Docker Compose / How to install Docker Compose on Ubuntu 16/18

Docker is a great tool for automating the deployment of Linux applications inside software containers, but to take full advantage of its potential each component of an application should run in its own individual container. For complex applications with a lot of components, orchestrating all the containers to start up, communicate, and shut down together can quickly become unwieldy.

The Docker community came up with a popular solution called Fig, which allowed you to use a single YAML file to orchestrate all your Docker containers and configurations. This became so popular that the Docker team decided to make Docker Compose based on the Fig source, which is now deprecated. Docker Compose makes it easier for users to orchestrate the processes of Docker containers, including starting up, shutting down, and setting up intra-container linking and volumes.

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to install the latest version of Docker Compose to help you manage multi-container applications.

Prerequisites

Ensure you install docker on the host before install docker compose. 

You can install docker on Amazon linux with the below command

yum update -y

yum install docker -y

service docker start

service docker status

Install Compose on Linux systems

On Linux, you can download the Docker Compose binary from the Compose repository release page on GitHub. Follow the instructions from the link, which involve running the curl command in your terminal to download the binaries. These step-by-step instructions are also included below.

For alpine, the following dependency packages are needed: py-pip, python-dev, libffi-dev, openssl-dev, gcc, libc-dev, and make.

1. Run this command to download the current stable release of Docker Compose:

   NOTE: to get the latest version (thanks @spodnet): 

2. DOCKER_CONFIG=${DOCKER_CONFIG:-$HOME/.docker}
    mkdir -p $DOCKER_CONFIG/cli-plugins
    curl -SL https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/v2.23.3/docker-compose-linux-x86_64 -o $DOCKER_CONFIG/cli-plugins/docker-compose
   chmod +x $DOCKER_CONFIG/cli-plugins/docker-compose
   
   docker compose version