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Building a Microservice with Docker Compose

You’ve just completed developing your weather application, and are ready to deploy it to your production Docker server. After doing some analysis, you decided to deploy three containers that will be load-balanced using Nginx. To do this you need to create a Docker Compose file that will create three `weather-app` services on a private network. Then you will create an Nginx service that will be publicly accessible and have it load balance traffic to the weather-app services.

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Path Info

Level

Intermediate

Duration

1h 0m

Last updated

Aug 29, 2025

Challenge

Create the Compose File

Create docker-compose.yml:

vi docker-compose.yml

The contents of docker-compose.yml should be:

version: '3'
services:
  weather-app1:
    build:
      context: ./weather-app
      args:
        - VERSION=v2.0
    ports:
      - "8080:3000"
    networks:
     - weather_app
    environment:
      - NODE_ENV=production
  weather-app2:
    build:
      context: ./weather-app
      args:
        - VERSION=v2.0
    ports:
      - "8081:3000"
    networks:
     - weather_app
    environment:
      - NODE_ENV=production
  weather-app3:
    build:
      context: ./weather-app
      args:
        - VERSION=v2.0
    ports:
      - "8082:3000"
    networks:
     - weather_app
    environment:
      - NODE_ENV=production
  nginx:
      build: ./nginx
      tty: true
      ports:
       - '80:80'
      networks:
       - frontend
       - weather_app

networks:
  frontend:
  weather_app:
    internal: true

Challenge

Add the Services to nginx.conf

Update nginx/nginx.conf:

vi nginx/nginx.conf

The contents of nginx.conf should be:

events { worker_connections 1024; }

http {
  upstream localhost {
    server weather-app1:3000;
    server weather-app2:3000;
    server weather-app3:3000;
  }
  server {
    listen 80;
    server_name localhost;
    location / {
      proxy_pass http://localhost;
      proxy_set_header Host $host;
    }
  }
}

Challenge

Create the Docker Compose Service
Create the Compose service:
```
docker-compose up -d
```

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