Exclude services from being started with docker-compose using profiles?

Open Source Projects Compose
1

My docker-compose.yml defines multiple services which represent the full application stack. In development mode, I’d like to dynamically exclude certain services, so that I can run them from an IDE.

As of Docker Compose 1.28 it is possible to assign profiles to services as documented here but as far as I have understood, it only allows specifying which services shall be started, not which ones shall not get started.

In the end I’d like to achieve something like this (pseduo command):

docker-compose up --exclude service1,service2

Do you have any recommendations on how to exclude certain services? Would that be possible using Docker Compose profiles?

2

What you can do is instead of exclude services you can simply include all services that you want to start up.

Following the docker compose up --help documentation you can pass mutiple service names.
To make sure linked containers (when using depends_on attribute) are not started you should add the --no-deps flag.

Your command should look like this:
docker compose up --no-deps service1, service2, service5