Run Docker Compose as a Linux Service with systemd

Docker Compose on a Linux server should start on boot, stop cleanly on shutdown, and survive reboots without manual intervention.

Docker Compose is not Kubernetes, and that is fine for the workloads this guide targets. For many real systems, a Compose project on a single Linux host is the right amount of infrastructure — simple, readable, easy to back up, and good enough for internal tools, side projects, self-hosted services, staging environments, small production apps, and developer infrastructure.

The missing piece is usually service management. Running this manually is not enough:

docker compose up -d

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