Keeping a Docker Container Open in Docker Compose

I wanted to run a couple of Alpine containers with Docker Compose to test out network communication between them. But the containers immediately exited after starting because there was nothing running on them.

I needed the equivalent of running docker run -it alpine but in Docker Compose.

I found two ways of doing this. git The first is to use stdin_open: true in the Docker Compose file. The second is to use tty: true. Both will keep the container running. Then I can attach to the container terminal to run some commands.

Here is the docker-compose.yml file I used -

 1services:
 2  alpineone:
 3    container_name: first_container
 4    image: alpine
 5    stdin_open: true # this works
 6
 7  alpinetwo:
 8    container_name: second_container
 9    image: alpine
10    tty: true # this also works

Run Docker compose with -

docker compose -f docker-compose.yml up 

To attach to the running containers, use -

docker exec -it first_container /bin/sh
# and
docker exec -it second_container /bin/sh