Deploy with Kube-Compose

Here we walk through the basics of pushing your app to the cluster. Your app should be working locally via docker-compose before trying to push it to the cluster.

Push docker containers

The containers you’ve built must be published on dockerhub so that they are accessible outside of your own system, this can be done with:

docker compose push

Publish to kubernetes cluster

kube-compose is designed to be analogous with docker compose, so whatever you would have used with docker compose, likely works with kube-compose as well. For example, to launch the app on the cluster use:

# `sshkube run` ensures that your configured access to the cluster is set up
sshkube run kube-compose up

# you could alternatively setup your shell with sshkube and just use kube-compose directly
$(sshkube init)
kube-compose up

Updating your deployment

Just like with docker compose, you can update by running up again. It’s good practice, however, to make sure that your update won’t overwrite something you didn’t expect by first running:

sshkube run kube-compose diff

Rolling back your deployment

If you broke something after an update and want to rollback quickly, you can use:

sshkube run kube-compose rollback

But note that this won’t work if you don’t maintain separate versions of your docker container, so it’s recommended that you do whenver you push. E.g. when updating your container use:

kube-compose version yourapp-app patch
docker compose build yourapp-app
docker compose push yourapp-app

kube-compose version makes it easy to version your containers with semver.