You could take some clues from “Using Compose in production”
You’ll almost certainly want to make changes to your app configuration that are more appropriate to a live environment. These changes may include:
- Removing any volume bindings for application code, so that code stays inside the container and can’t be changed from outside
- Binding to different ports on the host
- Setting environment variables differently (e.g., to decrease the verbosity of logging, or to enable email sending)
- Specifying a restart policy (e.g., restart: always) to avoid downtime
- Adding extra services (e.g., a log aggregator)
The advice is then not quite similar to the example you mention:
For this reason, you’ll probably want to define an additional Compose file, say
production.yml, which specifies production-appropriate configuration. This configuration file only needs to include the changes you’d like to make from the original Compose file.docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml -f production.yml up -d
This overriding mechanism is better than trying to mix dev and prod logic in one compose file, with environment variable to try and select one.
Note: If you name your second dockerfile docker-compose.override.yml, a simple docker-compose up would read the overrides automatically.
But in your case, a name based on the environment is clearer.