15-profiles.md

Profiles

With profiles you can define a set of active profiles so your Compose application model is adjusted for various usages and environments. The exact mechanism is implementation specific and may include command line flags, environment variables, etc.

The services top-level element supports a profiles attribute to define a list of named profiles. Services without a profiles attribute are always enabled.

A service is ignored by Compose when none of the listed profiles match the active ones, unless the service is explicitly targeted by a command. In that case its profile is added to the set of active profiles.

Note

All other top-level elements are not affected by profiles and are always active.

References to other services (by links, extends or shared resource syntax service:xxx) do not automatically enable a component that would otherwise have been ignored by active profiles. Instead Compose returns an error.

Illustrative example

services:
  foo:
    image: foo
  bar:
    image: bar
    profiles:
      - test
  baz:
    image: baz
    depends_on:
      - bar
    profiles:
      - test
  zot:
    image: zot
    depends_on:
      - bar
    profiles:
      - debug

In the above example:

• If the Compose application model is parsed with no profile enabled, it only contains the foo service.
• If the profile test is enabled, the model contains the services bar and baz, and service foo, which is always enabled.
• If the profile debug is enabled, the model contains both foo and zot services, but not bar and baz, and as such the model is invalid regarding the depends_on constraint of zot.
• If the profiles debug and test are enabled, the model contains all services; foo, bar, baz and zot.
• If Compose is executed with bar as the explicit service to run, bar and the test profile are active even if test profile is not enabled.
• If Compose is executed with baz as the explicit service to run, the service baz and the profile test are active and bar is pulled in by the depends_on constraint.
• If Compose is executed with zot as the explicit service to run, again the model is invalid regarding the depends_on constraint of zot, since zot and bar have no common profiles listed.
• If Compose is executed with zot as the explicit service to run and profile test is enabled, profile debug is automatically enabled and service bar is pulled in as a dependency starting both services zot and bar.

See how you can use profiles in Docker Compose.