Connecting to RabbitMQ container with docker-compose

Aha! I fixed it. @Ijaz was totally correct – the RabbitMQ service takes a while to start, and my worker tries to connect before it’s running.

I tried using a delay, but this failed when the RabbitMQ took longer than usual.

This is also indicative of a larger architectural problem – what happens if the queuing service (RabbitMQ in my case) goes offline during production? Right now, my entire site fails. There needs to be some built-in redundancy and polling.

As described this this related answer, we can use healthchecks in docker-compose 3+:

version: "3"

services:

  rabbitmq:
    image: rabbitmq
    command: rabbitmq-server
    expose:
      - 5672
      - 15672
    healthcheck:
      test: [ "CMD", "nc", "-z", "localhost", "5672" ]
      interval: 5s
      timeout: 15s
      retries: 1

  worker:
    image: worker
    restart: on-failure
    depends_on:
      - rabbitmq

Now, the worker container will restart a few times while the rabbitmq container stays unhealthy. rabbitmq immediately becomes healthy when nc -z localhost 5672 succeeds – i.e. when the queuing is live!