Upgrade Your Local Docker-Compose Development With Dozzle

I’m a huge fan of docker-compose for local development. Whether professionally or personal projects, most of my work these days is building micro-services that run in Docker containers. In addition, most of these containers at some point talk to each other or with a database, so docker-compose is always in the mix.

If you’re not using docker-compose for your local Docker development, let me start with, you’re doing it all wrong! Compose offers so much for local development and there will be a whole other post about that subject later. What makes compose so great is its ability to allow me to spin up multiple containers at once, and test my code in a more real-world environment. If my stack consists of 5 APIs and a database, I can use compose to spin all those up and test locally before deploying, its fantastic.

A drawback, however, is looking at logs. To be fair, there is nothing wrong with how Docker and Compose spit out logs. It's simple and does the job, but as you’ll see it can be hard to sift through them. Especially when you have multiple containers running at the same time. This is where Dozzle comes to the rescue. Dozzle is a simple, lightweight application that provides you with a web-based interface to monitor your Docker container logs live.