// the find
grammarly/rocker-compose
Docker composition tool with idempotency features for deploying apps composed of multiple containers.
A Docker multi-container orchestration tool from Grammarly circa 2015, predating docker-compose's maturity. It added idempotency, variable templating, and finer-grained update control that docker-compose lacked at the time. Officially discontinued in 2018 — the README says so upfront.
- The authors were honest enough to kill it publicly rather than let it rot silently — the README is a model of how to sunset an open-source project
- The diff-based reconciliation approach (compare desired vs actual container state, apply minimum changes) was genuinely ahead of docker-compose at the time
- Vendored dependencies and a Makefile mean you can probably still build it without hunting for a working Go environment from 2015
- Dead since 2018 — docker-compose v2, Compose Spec, and Kubernetes have made every feature here redundant
- Targets the pre-Docker-Swarm, pre-Compose-v2 API surface; likely incompatible with any Docker daemon from the last four years
- 408 stars and 20 forks over a decade of existence suggests it never had meaningful adoption outside Grammarly's own stack
- The AWS SDK vendor tree in a Docker composition tool is a strange dependency to carry and hints at scope creep that was never resolved before abandonment