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Tips and Tricks

Some Tips and Tricks for using application.

Using include with remote compose files

Docker Compose's include directive lets you pull in compose files from remote Git repositories or OCI artifacts directly:

docker-compose.yml
include:
  - https://github.com/example/app.git#v1.0.0:docker/docker-compose.yml

Compose file reference

See the full include syntax documentation in the Docker Compose documentation.

Resolving .env and other relative paths

When a remote compose file references relative paths — most commonly env_file: .env in a service definition — Docker Compose resolves those paths against the remote include's own directory inside doco-cd's internal cache, not against your deployment repository.

This means a deployment like the following will fail with "env file … not found" even if .env exists in your repository:

docker-compose.yml
include:
  - https://github.com/immich-app/immich.git#v3.0.3:docker/docker-compose.yml

env file /var/lib/.../compose-git-cache/.../docker/.env not found

Fix: use the long include form and set project_directory: .. This tells Docker Compose to resolve relative paths in the included file against your deployment working directory:

docker-compose.yml
include:
  - path: https://github.com/immich-app/immich.git#v3.0.3:docker/docker-compose.yml
    project_directory: .  # resolve .env and other relative paths from your repo root

With project_directory: ., any .env file you place in your repository root (or the directory configured as working_dir in .doco-cd.yml) will be picked up correctly by the included compose file.

Removing a container service

You can add the scale: 0 option in the docker-compose.yml file to remove a service (container). The scale option sets the number of containers to run for the service. Setting it to 0 will scale the service down to zero containers.

docker-compose.yml
services:
  webserver:
    scale: 0
    image: nginx

Add the following line to the deploy section of the service in the docker-compose.yml file to remove a service (container) in Docker Swarm mode:

docker-compose.yml
services:
  webserver:
    deploy:
      replicas: 0
    image: nginx

Note

If you scale down all services in a Docker project or Swarm stack, the entire project will be stopped, but the volumes, configs, secrets, and networks will still exist.

Tip

To delete volumes, networks, and images, you can use destroy: true for the default destructive cleanup behavior, or the full destroy object for custom removal options (See Destroy settings).