dev-services

A personal toolbox of reusable, project-agnostic Docker services for local development.

The idea: instead of installing MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, etc. directly on your machine, you spin them up on demand as Docker containers and connect to them from localhost. Your applications (e.g. a Laravel app) keep running directly on the host — only the databases/caches live in containers. This repo is not tied to any specific project; it's just infrastructure you keep around and reuse across all of them.

Each service is independent: you start only what you need (e.g. just Postgres), and it doesn't affect the others.

Prerequisites

• Docker Engine
• The Docker Compose plugin (docker compose version should work)

Setup

Copy the example environment file and adjust values if you want non-default credentials/ports:

cp .env.example .env

.env is gitignored, so your local credentials never get committed.

Starting and stopping services

Each service lives behind its own Compose profile, so you can start only what you need.

Postgres

docker compose --profile postgres up -d
docker compose --profile postgres down

MySQL

docker compose --profile mysql up -d
docker compose --profile mysql down

Redis

docker compose --profile redis up -d
docker compose --profile redis down

You can also start more than one at a time by repeating --profile:

docker compose --profile postgres --profile redis up -d

Data for Postgres and MySQL is stored in named Docker volumes, so it persists across down/up cycles. To wipe a service's data, remove its volume explicitly (e.g. docker volume rm dev-services_postgres_data).

Connecting from a host application

All services bind only to 127.0.0.1, so they're reachable from your host machine but not from other devices on your network.

Service	Host	Default port	Credentials/env vars
Postgres	127.0.0.1	5432	POSTGRES_USER, POSTGRES_PASSWORD, POSTGRES_DB
MySQL	127.0.0.1	3306	MYSQL_USER, MYSQL_PASSWORD, MYSQL_DATABASE (or MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD for root)
Redis	127.0.0.1	6379	none by default

Use the values you set in your .env file (or the defaults from .env.example if you didn't change them) when configuring your application's database/cache connection.

Adding new services

To add another service later (e.g. MongoDB), follow the same pattern in docker-compose.yml:

1. Add a new service block with its own profiles: ["name"] entry.
2. Bind its port(s) to 127.0.0.1 using an environment variable, e.g. "127.0.0.1:${MONGO_PORT:-27017}:27017".
3. Add a named volume if it needs persistent data.
4. Add the corresponding environment variables (with defaults) to .env.example.

That's it — the new service can then be started independently with docker compose --profile name up -d.