Docker-Compose: how to wait for other service to be ready?

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1Z10

I have the following docker-compose, where I need to wait for the service jhipster-registry to be up and accepting connections before starting myprogram-app.

I tried the healtcheck way, following the official doc https://docs.docker.com/compose/compose-file/compose-file-v2/

version: '2.1'
services:
    myprogram-app:
        image: myprogram
        mem_limit: 1024m
        environment:
            - SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE=prod,swagger
            - EUREKA_CLIENT_SERVICE_URL_DEFAULTZONE=http://admin:$${jhipster.registry.password}@jhipster-registry:8761/eureka
            - SPRING_CLOUD_CONFIG_URI=http://admin:$${jhipster.registry.password}@jhipster-registry:8761/config
            - SPRING_DATASOURCE_URL=jdbc:postgresql://myprogram-postgresql:5432/myprogram
            - JHIPSTER_SLEEP=0
            - SPRING_DATA_ELASTICSEARCH_CLUSTER_NODES=myprogram-elasticsearch:9300
            - JHIPSTER_REGISTRY_PASSWORD=53bqDrurQAthqrXG
            - EMAIL_USERNAME
            - EMAIL_PASSWORD
        ports:
            - 8080:8080
        networks:
          - backend
        depends_on:
          - jhipster-registry:
              "condition": service_started
          - myprogram-postgresql
          - myprogram-elasticsearch
    myprogram-postgresql:
        image: postgres:9.6.5
        mem_limit: 256m
        environment:
            - POSTGRES_USER=myprogram
            - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=myprogram
        networks:
          - backend
    myprogram-elasticsearch:
        image: elasticsearch:2.4.6
        mem_limit: 512m
        networks:
          - backend
    jhipster-registry:
        extends:
            file: jhipster-registry.yml
            service: jhipster-registry
        mem_limit: 512m
        ports:
            - 8761:8761
        networks:
          - backend
        healthcheck:
          test: "exit 0"
networks:
  backend:
    driver: "bridge"

but I get the following error when running docker-compose up:

ERROR: The Compose file './docker-compose.yml' is invalid because:
services.myprogram-app.depends_on contains {"jhipster-registry": {"condition": "service_started"}}, which is an invalid type, it should be a string

Am I doing something wrong, or this feature is no more supported? How to achieve this sync between services?

Updated version

version: '2.1'
services:
    myprogram-app:
        image: myprogram
        mem_limit: 1024m
        environment:
            - SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE=prod,swagger
            - EUREKA_CLIENT_SERVICE_URL_DEFAULTZONE=http://admin:$${jhipster.registry.password}@jhipster-registry:8761/eureka
            - SPRING_CLOUD_CONFIG_URI=http://admin:$${jhipster.registry.password}@jhipster-registry:8761/config
            - SPRING_DATASOURCE_URL=jdbc:postgresql://myprogram-postgresql:5432/myprogram
            - JHIPSTER_SLEEP=0
            - SPRING_DATA_ELASTICSEARCH_CLUSTER_NODES=myprogram-elasticsearch:9300
            - JHIPSTER_REGISTRY_PASSWORD=53bqDrurQAthqrXG
            - EMAIL_USERNAME
            - EMAIL_PASSWORD
        ports:
            - 8080:8080
        networks:
          - backend
        depends_on:
          jhipster-registry:
            condition: service_healthy
          myprogram-postgresql:
            condition: service_started
          myprogram-elasticsearch:
            condition: service_started
        #restart: on-failure
    myprogram-postgresql:
        image: postgres:9.6.5
        mem_limit: 256m
        environment:
            - POSTGRES_USER=myprogram
            - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=tuenemreh
        networks:
          - backend
    myprogram-elasticsearch:
        image: elasticsearch:2.4.6
        mem_limit: 512m
        networks:
          - backend
    jhipster-registry:
        extends:
            file: jhipster-registry.yml
            service: jhipster-registry
        mem_limit: 512m
        ports:
            - 8761:8761
        networks:
          - backend
        healthcheck:
          test: ["CMD", "curl", "-f", "http://jhipster-registry:8761", "|| exit 1"]
          interval: 30s
          retries: 20
          #start_period: 30s
networks:
  backend:
    driver: "bridge"

The updated version gives me a different error,

ERROR: for myprogram-app  Container "8ebca614590c" is unhealthy.
ERROR: Encountered errors while bringing up the project.

saying that the container of jhipster-registry is unhealthy, but it's reachable via browser. How can I fix the command in the healthcheck to make it work?

Best Approach - Resilient App Starts

While docker does support startup dependencies, they officially recommend updating your app start logic to test for the availability of external dependencies and retry. This has lots of benefits for robust applications that may restart in the wild on the fly in addition to circumventing the race condition in docker compose up

depends_on & service_healthy - Compose 1.27.0<sup>+</sup>

depends_on is back in docker compose v1.27.0+ (was deprecated in v3) in the Compose Specification

Each service should also implement a service_healthy check to be able to report if it's fully setup and ready for downstream dependencies.

version: '3.0'
services:
  php:
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: tests/Docker/Dockerfile-PHP
    depends_on:
      redis:
        condition: service_healthy
  redis:
    image: redis
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD", "redis-cli", "ping"]
      interval: 1s
      timeout: 3s
      retries: 30

wait-for-it.sh

The recommended approach from docker according to their docs on Control startup and shutdown order in Compose is to download wait-for-it.sh which takes in the domain:port to poll and then executes the next set of commands if successful.

version: "2"
services:
  web:
    build: .
    ports:
      - "80:8000"
    depends_on:
      - "db"
    command: ["./wait-for-it.sh", "db:5432", "--", "python", "app.py"]
  db:
    image: postgres

Note: This requires overriding the startup command of the image, so make sure you know what wanted to pass to maintain parity of the default startup.

Further Reading