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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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Lab platform
Lab Info
Level
Intermediate
Last updated
Sep 21, 2025
Duration
1h 0m

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Table of Contents
  1. 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
    
    
  2. 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;
        }
      }
    }
    
  3. Challenge

    Create the Docker Compose Service

    Create the Compose service:

    docker-compose up -d
    
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