How Do You Set Up Local Microservices Development with Docker Compose?

Barış Yıldızoğlu — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 19:12:03 +0000

Hey folks,

I’m working on a small side project built around a microservices architecture — a few API services, some databases, nothing huge. The folder structure looks like this:

~/myProject/
├── docker-compose.yml
├── .git/
├── service-a/
├── service-b/
└── service-c/

When I run everything with docker-compose up, my code is on my own local machine, but dependencies live inside the containers, so VS Code keeps throwing lint/type errors (since node_modules or pip packages aren’t on my local machine).

If I try using Dev Containers and attach directly to a service, it works better — except that the .git folder isn’t mounted inside the container, so Git integration (history, branches, etc.) breaks inside VS Code. So my questions are:

How do you handle this local vs container dev setup cleanly?
Any best practices for microservice development with Docker Compose + VS Code Dev Containers?

Should I just mount the whole project, including .git, into the containers?
Maybe set up multi-stage Dev Containers?
Or is it better to keep containers running but code outside and sync changes somehow?
Or something else?

Would love to see how others structure their setups

Thanks in advance!

Forem: Barış Yıldızoğlu

How Do You Set Up Local Microservices Development with Docker Compose?