Add Ability to Act on a Single Stack

[patbakdev]

This project fills a niche that doesn't really get much attention. I'm slowly replacing aspects of my setup. Especially global environment management.

When I am adding/debuging a new stack, I like to be able to bring it up/down independently. At the moment, that means I still need to use docker compose and miss out on all the good environment handling dockform does.

I'd like to propose adding the ability to bring stacks up/down independent of everything else or just other stacks. Something like the ability to pass a stack to dockform plan and dockform apply similiar to how dockform compose render works. Ideally it would handle any volumes/filesets/networks associated with that stack, but just the ability to have a basic docker compose up with environment interpolation would great.

I'm not sure if you have a roadmap or would rather have these as Issues.

[gcstr]

Hey @patbakdev,

Thanks for the kind words and the thoughtful suggestion! You'll be happy to hear that this is exactly what I've been working on for the past couple of months.

The upcoming v0.8 release rewrites a big portion of Dockform and adds the ability to target specific stacks:

  # Apply a single stack
  dockform apply --stack default/web

  # Apply multiple stacks
  dockform apply --stack default/web --stack default/api

  # Apply all stacks in a context
  dockform apply --context production

This works with plan, apply, and destroy — so you get the full plan-apply workflow scoped to just the stacks you care about, including their volumes, filesets, and networks.

But the biggest change is multi-node support. You can now define multiple Docker contexts in a single manifest and deploy to all your servers at once. It was quite annoying to cd between folders to manage dependent stacks across hosts.

v0.8 was just merged into main. The tests are gree, and I am running it smoothly in my environments. In the coming days, I will publish a Release Candidate. In the meantime, please feel free to open issues for anything else.

[patbakdev]

Fantastic!