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

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?

Solution 1:^[1]

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

Docker Approach - `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.

Historical Approach - `depends_on - service_healthy` (Deprecated 3+)

Historically, you could define a healthcheck (still a good practice) and then set a condition for depends_on to service_healthy, however the conditional variance of depends_on was deprecated in 3.0

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

Solution 2:^[2]

Update to version 3+.

Please follow the documents from version 3:

There are several things to be aware of when using depends_on:

depends_on does not wait for db and redis to be “ready” before starting web - only until they have been started.
If you need to wait for a service to be ready, see Controlling startup order for more on this problem and strategies for solving it.
Version 3 no longer supports the condition form of depends_on.
The depends_on option is ignored when deploying a stack in swarm mode with a version 3 Compose file.

I would consider using the restart_policy option for configuring your myprogram-app to restart until the jhipster-registry is up and accepting connections:

 restart_policy:
        condition: on-failure
        delay: 3s
        max_attempts: 5
        window: 60s

Solution 3:^[3]

Although you already got an answer, it should be mentioned that what you are trying to achieve have some nasty risks.

Ideally a service should be self sufficient and smart enough to retry and await for dependencies to be available (before a going down). Otherwise you will be more exposed to one failure propagating to other services. Also consider that a system reboot, unlike a manual start might ignore the dependencies order.

If one service crash causes all your system to go down, you might have a tool to restart everything again, but it would be better having services that resist that case.

Solution 4:^[4]

The best approach I found is to check for the desired port in the entrypoint. There are different ways to do that e.g. wait-for-it but I like to use this solution that is cross-platform between apline and bash images and doesn't download custom scripts from GitHub:

Install netcat-openbsd (works with apt and apk). Then in the entrypoint (works with both #!/bin/bash and #!/bin/sh):

#!/bin/bash

wait_for()
{
  echo "Waiting $1 seconds for $2:$3"
  timeout $1 sh -c 'until nc -z $0 $1; do sleep 0.1; done' $2 $3 || return 1
  echo "$2:$3 available"
}


wait_for 10 db 5432
wait_for 10 redis 6379

You can also make this into a 1-liner if you don't want to print anything.

Sources

This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Overflow and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Source: Stack Overflow

Solution	Source
Solution 1
Solution 2	RtmY
Solution 3	SystematicFrank
Solution 4	thisismydesign

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

Solution 1:[1]

Best Approach - Resilient App Starts

Docker Approach - wait-for-it.sh

Historical Approach - depends_on - service_healthy (Deprecated 3+)

Further Reading

Solution 2:[2]

Solution 3:[3]

Solution 4:[4]