In the previous section, you used Docker commands to perform the following tasks:
- Build a test image
- Run tests
- Build a release image
- Run the application
Each time we ran a Docker command, we had to supply quite a bit of configuration, and trying to remember the various commands that you need to run is already starting to become difficult. In addition to this, we also discovered that to start the release image for the application, we need to have an operational external database. For local testing use cases, running an external database in another container is an excellent approach, but having to orchestrate this by running a series of Docker commands with lots of different input parameters very quickly becomes difficult to manage.
Docker Compose is a tool that allows you to orchestrate multi-container environments...