Templates should not use docker-compose, but a custom format

[RDeluxe]

I feel like using compose with Dokploy is kind of a hack : a lot of nice features are not working with compose (such as some volumes settings, backups, etc.) and it's way harder to debug and maintain.

We should probably create some kind of minimal templating system (extending the template.toml?) that would create the services in Dokploy (via it's API) and link them together nicely.

Sorry if this has already been pointed out, eager to know what you think about this.

[Siumauricio]

Hello, could you explain in more detail?

I believe that using docker-compose makes it possible to implement any template without any hacks. The template.toml file is used to define the environment variables, domains, and mounts that the dokploy API expects, so we have

Some time ago, I had the idea of supporting templates but using applications, but this would be more work.

[RDeluxe]

Hello there!

For me, the use of compose in Dokploy is — in itself — suboptimal. For most project, you should have separate services.

Why? Because the UI and UX of Dokploy are all about separate services: checking logs, deployments, volume and database backups... some templates are spinning a SQL DB in a docker-compose, for example.

There are also other features, like path mounting, which are not working as well with docker-compose (or are not documented correctly), see here.

So, while I understand the need for compose support (spinning a complete architecture quickly) Dokploy should probably advice against putting some services in a compose (e.g. databases) because of the lose of features it implies.

[nktnet1]

I think the features mentioned are all supported for individual services within the compose for as long as I can remember - just a few dropdowns/clicks in their respective tabs.

With that said, I do enjoy setting up separate services for projects where there are custom applications and databases. Environment variables for example are simpler to manage per service.

Now that v0.30.0 just dropped with all the amazing docker features, perhaps this should be revisited. To make it a backwards-compatible addition, maybe we can consider introducing project templates on top of service templates, where a project can be initialised with a database/redis/valkey/elasticsearch/etc all linked up.