Much of the time I’m working on the Costs to Expect App and Website I code against the live Costs to Expect API. I’m reading data, so it makes sense to read live data, in my case the expenses for our children.
This approach isn’t suitable when I’m working on editing, creation, and deletion tasks; I don’t want lots of test data appearing on the API, and I don’t want to modify or remove live data.
In this instance, I want a local version of my Apps to use my local development instance of the API; this is simple to set up with docker networks.
I use Docker for development, the App, Website and API development environments are all Docker compose.
To connect two or more, compose apps, you need to create a shared network and then update each docker-compose file to use the newly created network.
To create a network, in your CLI enter.
docker network create <network-name>
Now, update your docker-compose files, we need to add a networks section.
networks: default: external: name: <network-name>
Now, when you bring your apps up, they will be able to communicate. Assuming your apps connect over HTTP, your apps can talk to each other using this format, http://:. In my case, my Website and App connect to the API using http://api:.