Get docker-compose.yml file location from running container?

Question

I have a few running docker containers created by executing docker-compose up.

Is there any way to get the exact file path of the corresponding docker-c

Answer 1

As far as I can see, docker inspect CONTAINER_NAME does not provide this information, nor does docker-compose provide a method to get compose-related information from a running container.

From an already running container that you do not control, the information is not there. You can infer the location using bind mount directories if the container creates any host mounts to relative directories. Otherwise, it's possible to deploy containers without compose, and it's possible to use compose without a compose file on the filesystem (piped via stdin), and compose does not store these details on running containers for you.

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What I'd like to do in a script:

• list certain running containers on a docker host
• get the corresponding docker-compose.yml file locations
• use docker-compose to restart all containers of the corresponding docker-compose projects at once

If you just want to run a restart on all containers in the same project, you don't need the first two steps, or even docker-compose. Instead, you can run:

docker ps --filter "label=com.docker.compose.project=${your_compose_project}" -q \
| xargs docker restart

Which uses a label docker-compose adds to each project it deploys.

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If you want to proactively store the compose file location for later use, you can inject that as a label in your compose file:

version: '2'
services:
  test:
    image: busybox
    command: tail -f /dev/null
    labels:
      COMPOSE_PATH: ${PWD} # many Linux shells define the PWD variable

If your shell does not set a ${PWD} environment variable, you can start compose with:

PWD=$(pwd) docker-compose up -d

Then you can later inspect containers for this label's value with:

docker inspect --format '{{.Config.Labels.COMPOSE_PATH}}' ${your_container_id}

And you can chain a filter and inspect command together to find the path for a specific project:

docker ps --filter "label=com.docker.compose.project=${your_compose_project}" -q \
| xargs docker inspect --format '{{.Config.Labels.COMPOSE_PATH}}'