How to run docker-compose automatically on startup lubuntu? - docker

Question

I have lubuntu 21.04 on my old PC. All is up to date. I install docker and docker-compose:
sudo apt install docker docker-compose
sudo systemctl enable --now docker
After that in home dir create folder web with my project. The structure of folder ~/web below:
.
├── docker-compose.yml
├── dockerfiles
│   ├── lg4
│   ├── test
│   └── test2
└── www
├── lg4
├── test
└── test2
All services have restart derictive in docker-compose.yml:
version: '3.7'
volumes:
mysql-volume:
networks:
app-shared:
driver: bridge
web_app-shared:
external: true
services:
php-httpd-lg4:
restart: always
build:
args:
user: lg4
uid: 1000
context: ./dockerfiles/lg4/
ports:
- 80:80
volumes:
- "./www/lg4:/var/www/html"
links:
- database
networks:
- app-shared
- web_app-shared
php-httpd-test:
restart: always
build:
args:
user: test
uid: 1000
context: ./dockerfiles/test/
ports:
- 82:80
volumes:
- "./www/test:/var/www/html"
links:
- database
networks:
- app-shared
- web_app-shared
php-httpd-test2:
restart: always
build:
args:
user: test
uid: 1000
context: ./dockerfiles/test2/
ports:
- 81:80
volumes:
- "./www/test2:/var/www/html"
links:
- database
networks:
- app-shared
- web_app-shared
database:
restart: always
image: mysql:5.7
restart: always
volumes:
- mysql-volume:/var/lib/mysql
ports:
- 3306:3306
networks:
- app-shared
- web_app-shared
environment:
TZ: "Europe/Moskow"
MYSQL_ALLOW_EMPTY_PASSWORD: "no"
MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: "root"
MYSQL_USER: 'admin'
MYSQL_PASSWORD: 'admin'
MYSQL_DATABASE: 'lg4'
phpmyadmin:
restart: always
image: phpmyadmin/phpmyadmin
links:
- 'database:db'
ports:
- 8081:80
environment:
UPLOAD_LIMIT: 300M
networks:
- app-shared
- web_app-shared
All works fine when I run comand sudo docker-compose up -d from ~/web dir. But how can I start all this automatically on startup system without typing any commands in terminal every time?

Answer 1

Yes, docker has restart policies such as docker run --restart=always that will handle this. This is also available in the compose.yml config file as restart: always.
In order to enable a restart policy, you need to use the --restart argument when executing docker run.
In my case what I decided to do is to use the --restart flag with the unless-stopped argument, that way my containers would be restarted in case that they crash or even after a reboot. Here’s an example of the command that I had to use:
docker run -dit --restart unless-stopped httpd
If you had an already running container that you wanted to change the restart policy for, you could use the docker update command to change that:
docker update --restart unless-stopped container_id
For more information you could take a look at the official documentation here:
https://docs.docker.com/config/containers/start-containers-automatically/

Answer 2

I believe actually that the selected answer is not truly correct if you use docker-compose to start your containers. That answer will start Docker but does nothing for your docker-compose (i have several) containers.
What i did was as follows:
create a very simple start script
#!/bin/bash
cd Docker-compse-project
docker-compose up
do the same for a stop script
you can save those wherever you want but i save them alongside the docker-compose.yml
now on modern ubuntu images you create a service image in .etc.systemd/system I named mine for the main services so for me MyWebApp
so MyWebApp.service looks like so
[Unit]
Description=My Web Application
After=network.target
[Service]
Type=forking
User=MyUserToRun
Group=MyGroupToRun
ExecStart=/path/to/startScript
ExecStop=/path/to/stopScript
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
now you can enable your service
sudo systemctl enable MyWebApp.service
And you can start and stop the service as usual