docker run to Docker Compose converter

How the conversion works

The converter reads your command the way a POSIX shell would: quotes, escaped spaces and \ line continuations are honoured, and ;, && or a new line start the next command. Everything between docker run and the image name is treated as an option; everything after the image becomes the service command.

Each option is mapped to its Compose Specification key. Named volumes (a source without a / or .) and user-defined networks are collected and declared once at the top level, so docker compose up works without manual edits.

Example

This command starts a Redis cache with persistence, a memory limit and a healthcheck:

docker run -d --name cache \
  -p 127.0.0.1:6379:6379 \
  -v redis-data:/data \
  --memory 512m \
  --health-cmd "redis-cli ping" --health-interval 10s \
  --restart unless-stopped \
  redis:7.4 redis-server --appendonly yes

It becomes:

services:
  cache:
    image: redis:7.4
    container_name: cache
    ports:
    - "127.0.0.1:6379:6379"
    volumes:
    - redis-data:/data
    mem_limit: 512m
    healthcheck:
      test:
      - CMD-SHELL
      - redis-cli ping
      interval: 10s
    restart: unless-stopped
    command:
    - redis-server
    - --appendonly
    - "yes"
volumes:
  redis-data: {}

Note that yes is quoted: unquoted, a YAML 1.1 parser would turn it into the boolean true and Redis would receive the wrong argument.

Flag mapping reference

Things to check after converting

• Drop container_name if you want to scale. A fixed container name prevents docker compose up --scale. The service name is enough for DNS between services.
• Move secrets out of the file. -e PASSWORD=… turns into a plain-text value in compose.yaml. Use an .env file (ignored by git) or Compose secrets instead.
• Add depends_on yourself. docker run has no ordering, so the converter cannot know that web needs db. Combine depends_on with condition: service_healthy when a healthcheck exists.
• Pin image versions. The converter warns when an image has no tag or uses latest, because a rebuild can silently pull a different major version.