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Docker Tip #62: Using 2 Dockerfiles in the Same Compose Project

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This use case comes up often if you work on a project where you need a separate Dockerfile for your back-end and front-end.

Quick Jump:

A prime example would be let’s say you had your back-end written in Python, Node, Ruby, Elixir or any language you prefer.

But then to deal with your front-end assets you are using Webpack (or similar).

It’s a reasonable idea to keep both of these as separate Docker images. Especially since Webpack in development will likely involve setting up a watcher service so you don’t need to keep re-building your assets on every change.

That means we have 2 separate processes, so running 2 containers is a good idea.

A Docker Compose snippet of using (2) Dockerfiles for (2) different services:
services:
  webpack:
    build:
      context: "."
      dockerfile: "Dockerfile.webpack"

  web:
    build: "."

In the web case it just uses our Dockerfile in the root of the directory but then in the webpack case it looks for Dockerfile.webpack instead.

A fully working example can be found in the Docker best practices example repo that has a few web framework examples.

A variant of this set up would be to set the context to ./assets and put a Dockerfile in there instead of using a different Dockerfile filename but personally I like it when all of my Docker related files are in the same directory.

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