Install Docker Compose

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

You can run Compose on macOS, Windows and 64-bit Linux. To install it, you’ll need to install Docker first.

To install Compose, do the following:

  1. Install Docker Engine:

  2. The Docker Toolbox installation includes both Engine and Compose, so Mac and Windows users are done installing. Others should continue to the next step.

  3. Go to the Compose repository release page on GitHub.

  4. Follow the instructions from the release page and run the curl command, which the release page specifies, in your terminal.

    Note: If you get a “Permission denied” error, your /usr/local/bin directory probably isn’t writable and you’ll need to install Compose as the superuser. Run sudo -i, then the two commands below, then exit.

    The following is an example command illustrating the format:

    $ curl -L "https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.10.0/docker-compose-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m)" -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

    If you have problems installing with curl, see Alternative Install Options.

  5. Apply executable permissions to the binary:

    $ chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

  6. Optionally, install command completion for the bash and zsh shell.

  7. Test the installation.

    $ docker-compose --version

docker-compose version: 1.10.0

Alternative install options

Install using pip

Compose can be installed from pypi using pip. If you install using pip it is highly recommended that you use a virtualenv because many operating systems have python system packages that conflict with docker-compose dependencies. See the virtualenv tutorial to get started.

$ pip install docker-compose

Note: pip version 6.0 or greater is required

Install as a container

Compose can also be run inside a container, from a small bash script wrapper. To install compose as a container run:

$ curl -L https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.10.0/run.sh > /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
$ chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

Master builds

If you’re interested in trying out a pre-release build you can download a binary from https://dl.bintray.com/docker-compose/master/. Pre-release builds allow you to try out new features before they are released, but may be less stable.

Upgrading

If you’re upgrading from Compose 1.2 or earlier, you’ll need to remove or migrate your existing containers after upgrading Compose. This is because, as of version 1.3, Compose uses Docker labels to keep track of containers, and so they need to be recreated with labels added.

If Compose detects containers that were created without labels, it will refuse to run so that you don’t end up with two sets of them. If you want to keep using your existing containers (for example, because they have data volumes you want to preserve) you can use compose 1.5.x to migrate them with the following command:

$ docker-compose migrate-to-labels

Alternatively, if you’re not worried about keeping them, you can remove them. Compose will just create new ones.

docker rm -f -v myapp_web_1 myapp_db_1 ...

Uninstallation

To uninstall Docker Compose if you installed using curl:

rm /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

To uninstall Docker Compose if you installed using pip:

$ pip uninstall docker-compose

Note: If you get a “Permission denied” error using either of the above methods, you probably do not have the proper permissions to remove docker-compose. To force the removal, prepend sudo to either of the above >commands and run again.

Where to go next

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