How to run docker-compose on remote host?

After the release of Docker 18.09.0 and the (as of now) upcoming docker-compose v1.23.1 release this will get a whole lot easier. This mentioned Docker release added support for the ssh protocol to the DOCKER_HOST environment variable and the -H argument to docker ... commands respectively. The next docker-compose release will incorporate this feature as well.

First of all, you'll need SSH access to the target machine (which you'll probably need with any approach).

Then, either:

# Re-direct to remote environment.
export DOCKER_HOST="ssh://my-user@remote-host"

# Run your docker-compose commands.
docker-compose pull
docker-compose down
docker-compose up

# All docker-compose commands here will be run on remote-host.

# Switch back to your local environment.
unset DOCKER_HOST

Or, if you prefer, all in one go for one command only:

docker-compose -H "ssh://my-user@remote-host" up

One great thing about this is that all your local environment variables that you might use in your docker-compose.yml file for configuration are available without having to transfer them over to remote-host in some way.

You can now use docker contexts for this:

docker context create dev ‐‐docker “host=ssh://user@remotemachine”

docker-compose ‐‐context dev up -d

More info here: https://www.docker.com/blog/how-to-deploy-on-remote-docker-hosts-with-docker-compose/

From the compose documentation

Compose CLI environment variables

DOCKER_HOST

Sets the URL of the docker daemon. As with the Docker client, defaults to unix:///var/run/docker.sock.

so that we can do

export DOCKER_HOST=tcp://192.168.1.2:2375
docker-compose up

If you don't need to run docker container on your local machine, but still on the same remote machine, you can change this in your docker setting.

On the local machine: You can control remote host with -H parameter

docker -H tcp://remote:2375 pull ubuntu

To use it with docker-compose, you should add this parameter in /etc/default/docker

On the remote machine

You should change listen from external adress and not only unix socket.

See Bind Docker to another host/port or a Unix socket for more details.

If you need to run container on multiple remote hoste, you should configure Docker Swarm