Docker Wiring / Service Orchestration?

So, I ended up writing this little python scripts that wires up the various docker images that I need locally and makes them talk to one another correctly.

ie. pointing my app the docker DB. I have an nginx image load balancer I use to redirect traffic between DEV, docker image, and my debugger depending on the use case.

The thing is… this feels like i’m re-inventing the wheel. I’m sure I’m not the only one that ran into this problem, and was wondering if anyone had any suggestion for a better docker tool I should be using.

Right now everything is DNS based, so I’m simply overriding my /etc/hosts file and modifying the nginx services.conf to route traffic as need be on a case by case basis.

I would love to hear what people are using to control traffic / routing between containers, physical servers and a local machine.

do you know docker-compose or docker swarm/stacks?

Docker swarm doesn’t seem to make sense for a single machine. I’m using docker-compose in the ‘wiring’ setup I mentioned above. I heard about stacks but haven’t looked into it to any great details yet.

I haven’t found swarm / compose to solve my issue, but I’ll look into docker stacks to see what it brings to the table.

could you describe your issue a bit detailed? want to know which parts are not covered with compose.