compose-spec/compose-spec resource

Health v2 · maintenance only

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2722 stars · 782 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

The Compose Specification is a vendor-neutral standard that defines multi-container, platform-agnostic container-based applications in a single YAML file. This repository hosts the specification document and schema that implementations such as Docker Compose (the reference implementation), Kompose, Nerdctl, and Podman Compose build upon.

Use cases

• define a multi-container docker application in a single standard yaml file
• write compose files that work across docker compose, podman compose, and nerdctl
• convert compose files into kubernetes manifests with kompose
• validate a docker-compose.yml against the official schema
• make container app definitions portable between local development and cloud providers
• find the canonical spec for container application configuration

When to choose

• you want one YAML application definition usable for local development and cloud deployment without vendor lock-in
• you are building a tool that parses, generates, or validates Compose files and need to conform to the standard
• you want a simpler alternative to raw Kubernetes YAML for defining containerized services

When to avoid

• you need the full expressiveness of the Kubernetes API, networking policies, or operators - use native Kubernetes manifests or Helm charts instead
• you want an executable tool to run containers - this is a specification document, so use Docker Compose or another implementation
• your workflow is a single container where a plain Dockerfile and docker run are sufficient

Facets

infra-config · maturity stable

infrastructure-as-code container-orchestration configuration-management developer-tools yaml deployment cloud-computing microservices developer-tools infrastructure-as-code cloud compose docker-compose specification containers multi-container-applications yaml-schema portability standard kompose podman-compose devops docker kubernetes

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="compose-spec/compose-spec")