For those of us, who has not yet given up on the simplicity of docker swarm mode, here is a helper script with some quality of life improvements for managing stacks in a cluster.

Born from actual use in production and testing clusters, this simple tool accelerates some of the usual toil work related to using docker swarm mode and stacks in particular.

Comming from developer using docker-compose for setting things up, this tool mimics the workflows used in docker-compose, supporting up, down, stop and recreate, and adding in the suport for default .env files for configuration.

The tool expects a compose type file named stack.yml to be present in the PWD. This may be accompanied by any support files like .env

Example

$ cd /stacks/my-stack
$ ls -a
stack.yml .env
$ stackctl up

The main script can be downloaded directly from github and placed in /usr/local/bin/ or however you prefer to install such utilities.

curl -o /tmp/stackctl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/stixes/stackctl/main/stackctl
sudo install /tmp/stackctl /usr/local/bin/

For easier updates, cloning this repository, and creating a symlink would also work.

If exists, stackctl will source configuration from /etc/stackctl and $HOME/.stackctlrc for both universal and per user setup. This allow you to set other environment variables, such as default secrets for use in stack.yml files and DOCKER_HOST and associated variables for accessing a non-local docker swarm.