16-04-2021



Docker Compose is a Python program that lets you easily deploy multiple containers on a server.

As you start exploring Docker, you'll learn that often to run a certain web-app, you'll need to run various services (like database, web-server etc) in different containers.

Deploying multiple containers is a lot easier with Docker Compose.

Ubuntu

Docker is an application that simplifies the process of managing application processes in containers. In this tutorial, you'll install and use Docker Community Edition (CE) on Ubuntu 20.04. There are two methods for installing Docker on Ubuntu 16.04. One method involves installing it on an existing installation of the operating system. The other involves spinning up a server with a tool called Docker Machine that auto-installs Docker on. Ubuntu is a Debian-based Linux operating system based on free software.

In this tutorial, you'll learn two ways of installing Docker Compose on Ubuntu:

  • Installing Docker Compose from Ubuntu's repository: Easier method but may not have the latest version of docker compose
  • Installing the latest Docker Compose using PIP: Gets you the newer docker compose version

Ubuntu In Docker

Keep in mind that to use Docker Compose, you must have Docker installed on Ubuntu.

Install Docker Compose from Ubuntu's repository

This is the easiest and recommend method. Unless you need the latest Docker Compose version for some specific reasons, you can manage very well with the docker compose version provides by Ubuntu.

Docker Compose is available in the universe repository of Ubuntu 20.04 and 18.04 so make sure to enable it first:

You probably won't need it but no harm in updating the local cache:

Now you can install Docker Compose in Ubuntu using this command:

You can check that Docker Compose is installed successfully by checking its version:

It should show an output like this:

Install the latest Docker Compose on Ubuntu using PIP

PIP stands for 'PIP Installs Package'. It's a command-line based package manager for installing Python applications.

Since Docker Compose is basically a Python program, you can use PIP to install it.

But before you do that, you need to install PIP on Ubuntu first.

Enable the universe repository first.

Install PIP now:

Now that you have PIP installed use it to install Docker Compose for all users on your Linux system:

Check the Docker Compose version to ensure that it is installed successfully:

You can see that Docker Compose installed via PIP is more recent version.

I hope you were able to successfully install Docker Compose on Ubuntu with this tutorial. Questions and suggestions are welcome.

Become a Member for FREE
Become a member to get the regular Linux newsletter (2-4 times a month) and access member-only contents.

Ubuntu In Docker Commands

Join the conversation.