compose-watcher

Cli that restarts you docker compose services when a file inside one of its volumes changes.

Useful for faster developement with containers that expose behaviour based on mounted files.

Example usage

• graphql api restart when schema file changes
• graphql api mocks based on schema file (like this one)
• Every container that generates code and exposes a server based on a config file
• Nodejs container restarts when the src folder changes, recompiling with tsc
• Mongoke restarts when config schema changes

Install

pip3 install compose-watcher
# then you can watch for changes
compose-watcher -f docker-compose.yml

Usage

Use the directories you want to track as service volumes.

Also consider using init: true in the compose service definition for faster killing of processes.

To not stop the docker-compose commands on other terminals there should be always a running container (this is a strange fact about docker-compose).

version: '3'

services:
  api:
    build: .
    command: sh -c 'tsc --incremental && node index.js'
    volumes:
      - ./src:/src

Then execute compose-watcher to watch changes.

compose-watcher -f docker-compose.yml --timeout 5

TODO add extension filter

How it works

After running the compose-watcher command all the volumes mounted on every service are tracked for change, when a change happens the service where the volume is mounted is restarted toghether with the services in the depends_on filed. Then the other services that have the restarted service as a dependency in depends_on are restarted too.