Advanced Tokaido

Directly Managing docker-compose

Tokaido creates and manages a Docker Compose file on your behalf, called docker-compose.tok.yml in your repository root. Although you can edit this file directly, Tokaido will overwrite your changes every time tok is run. Most of the time, this shouldn't be a problem as you don't need to modify the docker-compose file, but sometimes you might need to turn this off.

Some cases where modifying the Docker Compose file might be useful is when you want to add custom Tokaido components, or otherwise change how Tokaido works fundamentally. You can "unlock" this file by telling Tokaido that you want to manage it yourself by setting the customcompose setting to true:

tok config-set tokaido customcompose true

Once you enable this setting, Tokaido will not make any changes to your Docker Compose file; you'll be able to modify it directly to add any custom settings you want. This also means that most of the settings you can enable via the standard Tokaido configuration will no longer work.

If you do find yourself needing to manage the Docker Compose file directly, please let us know on when you needed to do that. Although we expose this advanced option, we really hope that it would not be necessary. If you needed to change this file, maybe there's a feature we can add for you?

Even after you opt-out of having Tokaido manage the docker-compose.tok.yml file, Tokaido is still an extremely powerful command line utility. Commands like tok up and tok open still work and operate normally.