Here are some useful snippets for quickly getting some services set up with docker.

I've left some commented out lines that you may want to add back in. There is no focus on security in these example configurations. Please read up the documentation to understand what you are running before you run these.

How to use a docker-compose.yml file

Just in case you haven't used docker-compose... this is how:

1. Make sure you have installed docker
2. And then run the Docker app (in Mac OS - just run it from the Applications folder)
3. Create a file called docker-compose.yml in your project (often at the root of the project, same place you would put your .env or package.json.
4. in the command line, change to the directory with that file (cd ~/your-dir/), and run docker-compose up (or docker compose up)
5. Once finished, run docker-compose up -d to run it detached (in the background), and docker-compose down to stop running it.

PostgreSQL in docker-compose.yml

Use this to run Postgres in docker-compose.

This is a typical docker-compose.yml config for running postgres.

version: "3"
services:
  db:
    image: postgres
    # restart: always 
    ports: 
      - "5432:5432"
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_USER=postgres
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=postgres
      - POSTGRES_DB=postgres
#    volumes: 
#      - 'postgres-data:/var/lib/postgresql/data'

Redis docker-compose.yml

version: "3"
services:
  cache:
    image: redis
    restart: always
    ports:
      - "6379:6379"
    volumes: 
      - redis-vol:/data
volumes:
  redis-vol:
    driver: local

Mysql docker-compose.yml

version: "3"
services:
  db:
    image: mysql:5.7
    restart: always
    environment:
      - MYSQL_DATABASE=mysql
      - MYSQL_USER=mysql
      - MYSQL_PASSWORD=mysql
      - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=mysql
    ports:
      - "3306:3306"
    volumes:
      - mysql-data:/var/lib/mysql
volumes:
  mysql-data:

MongoDB + Mongo Express

note: this sets username/password both to mongodb. You should update these.

  mongo:
    image: mongo
#    restart: always
    ports:
      - 27017:27017
    environment:
      MONGO_INITDB_ROOT_USERNAME: mongodb
      MONGO_INITDB_ROOT_PASSWORD: mongodb

  mongo-express:
    image: mongo-express
#    restart: always
    depends_on:
      - mongo
    ports:
      - 8081:8081
    environment:
      ME_CONFIG_MONGODB_ADMINUSERNAME: mongodb
      ME_CONFIG_MONGODB_ADMINPASSWORD: mongodb
      ME_CONFIG_MONGODB_URL: mongodb://mongodb:mongodb@mongo:27017/

Port mapping in docker-compose.yml

In most of the examples above I've mapped the ports from the container to the host with the same ports. For example:

// ...
ports:
  - "3306:3306"
// ...

The syntax is [host-port]:[container-port].

So if you were running a web server in the docker container (on port 80), you might want to access it on localhost:3001, so you would set:

ports: 
 - "3001:80"

You can also define multiple port mappings, for example the following to expose port 80 and 443

ports:
  - "80:80"
  - "443:443"

How to use a different docker-compose.yml config

Use the -f (file) flag to set what file to use.

You can use this to use alternative docker-compose files (such as one for a dev or testing environment)

docker-compose -f ./docker-compose.dev.yaml up
# or:
# docker compose -f ./docker-compose.dev.yaml up