Save docker-compose logs to a file
In later release docker-compose 1.7.x+, it is fixed. see https://github.com/docker/compose/issues/2227 & https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/tag/1.7.0
Before that, there is another way to achieve it, the solution of accepted answer is to access host files directly, Which may be not applicable for remote/security case.
Below we can get the container name from docker-compose ps command and let the docker logs command to loop
docker-compose ps | tail -n +3 | awk '{print $1}' | xargs -n1 docker logs
I am not sure what you are trying to achieve. Are you trying to reproduce
docker-compose logs > logs.txt
within the compose file as an instruction? Or is your issue that the redirect does not "catch" the whole output?
In the later, you can do:
docker-compose logs --no-color >& logs.txt
Or
docker-compose logs --no-color |& tee logs.txt
to both see the logs on the terminal and dump it to a file at the same time.
By default docker uses the json-file driver to record your containers logs and the raw json output of the logs can be found in:
/var/lib/docker/containers/[container-id]/[container-id]-json.log
You can get this location by running:
docker inspect --format='{{.LogPath}}' [container-id or container-name]
When you run docker-compose logs [service-name], docker-compose will attach to the service (container) you reference and the LogPrinter object will output the contents of the above file, but formatted so they're easier to read.
Related docs: https://docs.docker.com/compose/compose-file/#logging
The docker-compose logs command does terminate (unless you add the --follow setting).
The likely problem here is that the logs are so large it takes some time to format and output them. You can reduce this issue if you limit the output by specifying either/both the number of lines you want to read and the container you want to read from.
Try:
docker-compose logs --no-color --tail=1000 <service-name> > logs.txt
NOTE: service-name is name of service taken from docker-compose file - not container name or container id
(Adjust the tail number as required. I've added "--no-color" to simplify the output but it is not needed.)