skaffold VS Docker Compose

Compare skaffold vs Docker Compose and see what are their differences.

skaffold

Easy and Repeatable Kubernetes Development (by GoogleContainerTools)
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skaffold Docker Compose
83 383
14,650 32,248
0.7% 1.0%
9.2 9.6
3 days ago 4 days ago
Go Go
Apache License 2.0 Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

skaffold

Posts with mentions or reviews of skaffold. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-29.
  • You've just inherited a legacy C++ codebase, now what?
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Feb 2024
    A nice middle ground is using a tool like Google's Skaffold, which provides "Bazel-like" capabilities for composing Docker images and tagging them based on a number of strategies, including file manifests. In my case, I also use build args to explicitly set versions of external dependencies.

    While I am in a Typescript environment with this setup at the moment, my personal experience that Skaffold with Docker has a lighter implementation and maintenance overhead than Bazel. (You also get the added benefit of easy deployment and automatic rebuilds.)

    I quite liked using Bazel in a small Golang monorepo, but I ran into pain when trying to do things like include third-party pre-compiled binaries in the Docker builds, because of the unusual build rules convention. The advantage of Skaffold is it provides a thin build/tag/deploy/verify layer over Docker and other container types. Might be worth a look!

    Kudos to the Google team building it! https://skaffold.dev

  • Simplifying preview environments for everyone
    15 projects | dev.to | 28 Jun 2023
    To get a similar experience of preevy up, first we’ll need to split the build and deploy using process or alternatively employ tools that orchestrate build-tag-push-update-sync flow like Skaffold/Tilt.
  • Set up docker and kubernetes in ubuntu 22.04
    3 projects | dev.to | 19 Mar 2023
    We will be using docker and microk8s from Canonical. For running our software during development, we will be using skaffold which is a great tool developed by Google.
  • How do you develop cloud-native applications locally on Kubernetes?
    2 projects | /r/kubernetes | 2 Mar 2023
    I have used both Skaffold and Devspace. I prefer the latter.
  • Launch HN: Moonrepo (YC W23) – Open-source build system
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Feb 2023
    I wonder if it has some overlap with https://skaffold.dev/.
  • Building a RESTful API With Functions
    9 projects | dev.to | 29 Jan 2023
    K3d and Skaffold for local development
  • Does anyone else feel like this?
    3 projects | /r/kubernetes | 19 Jan 2023
    skaffold.dev - build in k8s - no more asking for the database password. All the plumbing to the backend is just done so it's easier for them to test and demo any branch
  • Which environments do you use/support?
    2 projects | /r/devops | 31 Dec 2022
    To access you service your have several options (it depends on teams the preferences) you can use scaffold https://skaffold.dev/ or for simple case kfwd https://github.com/GiGurra/kfwd. Last for everything that is normally expose on internet you would have an Ingress and use external-dns as you would in prod.
  • Approaches in Cloud Development Ergonomics
    7 projects | dev.to | 15 Nov 2022
    This approach works great when it’s feasible, which is usually at a very early stage in the life of the application where it’s still small and tenable. There’s some tooling that lets you extend this honeymoon phase by letting you do it more easily, like docker-compose, Skaffold, or Tilt. However, at a certain point, even if you’ve written whatever scriptage is needed to actually configure and run the latest stable version of all of your components together, you’re going to hit some sort of ceiling: if you’ve got a large database, or some CPU-heavy computations, or you’re relying on some managed service that can’t be containerized, this approach soon becomes untenable.
  • Connecting a local container with a Kubernetes cluster
    5 projects | /r/kubernetes | 20 Oct 2022
    Another dev optimization is the conditional rebuilding of a container. For example tools like devspace and skaffold support syncing filles which have changes, but which don't require recompiling.

Docker Compose

Posts with mentions or reviews of Docker Compose. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-08.
  • Hosting a simple docker-compose app with Nginx and generate a SSL with certbot on digitalocean droplet
    2 projects | dev.to | 8 Apr 2024
    curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com -o get-docker.sh sudo sh get-docker.sh # Install docker compose sudo curl -L "https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.29.2/docker-compose-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m)" -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose # Apply executable permissions to the binary sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose # Run Project docker-compose up -d
  • One Minute: Compose
    4 projects | dev.to | 30 Mar 2024
    Docker,
  • How to Set Up a Docker Container
    3 projects | dev.to | 13 Mar 2024
    This foundation now opens the door to even more powerful concepts. You can explore more advanced concepts such as container networking, streamlining the management of complex applications with Docker Compose, and how to make your application data persistent using volumes.
  • How to Dockerise a NodeJS - TypeScript API || A Comprehensive Guide from Environment Setup to Deployment with a CI/CD Pipeline
    5 projects | dev.to | 18 Jan 2024
    sudo curl -L "https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/latest/download/docker-compose-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m)" -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
  • Build and Deploy a ReactJS App to AWS EC2 with Docker, NGINX, and Automate with GitHub Actions.
    5 projects | dev.to | 5 Jan 2024
    [ec2-user]$ sudo yum update -y [ec2-user]$ sudo yum install -y docker [ec2-user]$ sudo service docker start [ec2-user]$ sudo curl -L https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/latest/download/docker-compose-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m) -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose [ec2-user]$ sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose [ec2-user]$ docker --version Docker version 20.10.23, build 7155243 [ec2-user]$ docker-compose --version Docker Compose version v2.18.1
  • MongoDB on Your Local Machine Using Docker: A Step-by-Step Guide
    2 projects | dev.to | 1 Jan 2024
    Docker Compose Documentation
  • Docker - Setup a local JS and Python Development environment (Part 2)
    2 projects | dev.to | 31 Dec 2023
    groupadd -g 997 docker gpasswd -a jenkins docker curl -L https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/tag/1.29.2/docker-compose-`uname -s`-`uname -m` > /usr/local/bin/docker-compose chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose #confirm the docker-compose is installed docker-compose version
  • Docker - Setup a local JS and Python Development environment
    3 projects | dev.to | 2 Dec 2023
    Now that we have our basic script to run the Node application, we'll create our base image. This time we will not be using the Dockerfile as we did earlier with the Python environment, but we will pull directly from the Docker Hub registry. Because we have multi-container services, it's best to orchestrate our services from a single file rather than building the services individually from a Dockerfile, which could be a daunting task if we need to build many services. Therefore, spinning up our Node containers with Docker Compose can be pretty handy in these situations. Note that Docker compose does not replace Dockerfile. Rather, the latter is part of a process to build Docker images, which are part of containers. Docker Compose allows us to operate the Node app alongside other services (assuming we have many services we need to spin up). In our case, it will be alongside our py service.
  • Jump into Microservices Testing with Docker Compose and Skyramp
    3 projects | dev.to | 30 Nov 2023
    My previous blog posts have focused on the array of options Skyramp provides for testing distributed applications deployed to Kubernetes clusters. However, Kubernetes is not required to reap the benefits of using Skyramp for test automation. You can also setup and deploy your system-under-test using Docker Compose. In this article, we'll explore how you can leverage Skyramp in conjunction with Docker Compose to streamline your microservices testing process.
  • Adding Dockerfiles to Open-Source Projects
    6 projects | dev.to | 23 Nov 2023
    From the official documentation,

What are some alternatives?

When comparing skaffold and Docker Compose you can also consider the following projects:

supervisor - Supervisor process control system for Unix (supervisord)

LibreNMS-docker - LibreNMS Docker image

terraform - Terraform enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure. It is a source-available tool that codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned.

Portainer - Making Docker and Kubernetes management easy.

Cloud-Init - unofficial mirror of Ubuntu's cloud-init

argo-cd - Declarative Continuous Deployment for Kubernetes

k3s - Lightweight Kubernetes

devspace - DevSpace - The Fastest Developer Tool for Kubernetes ⚡ Automate your deployment workflow with DevSpace and develop software directly inside Kubernetes.

docker-cloudflared - Cloudflared proxy-dns Docker image

portainer-templates - Various Portainer App Templates

acme-companion - Automated ACME SSL certificate generation for nginx-proxy

Nomad - Nomad is an easy-to-use, flexible, and performant workload orchestrator that can deploy a mix of microservice, batch, containerized, and non-containerized applications. Nomad is easy to operate and scale and has native Consul and Vault integrations.