How to change the service name generated by Docker stack in docker-compose

I do not think it is supported (yet).

docker service does support this

#!/bin/bash

SERVICE_NAME=myservice

docker service create \
  --name $SERVICE_NAME \
  --hostname $SERVICE_NAME \
  --network myoverlayattachableswarmscopednetwork \
  # IMAGE GOES HERE

I was able to log into a service and ping another one on the same network by the name I provided.

For example

docker exec -it $(docker ps -q -f name=myotherservice) bash
ping myservice

note that container_name is not supported in the docker-compose.yml file when using docker stack up|deploy

I think you can use "container_name" to specify the name of container in your yml file. Some like:

service-name:
    image: service-image
    container_name: my-custom-service-name

For communication between services you can use the serviceName as defined in the compose file (in your case your service name is service-name) if both services communicating are in the same network.

When you do docker service ls the stackname will be shown before every service. That's done because its possible to have two services with the same name which are not in a shared network. You can't change that and it wouldn't make sense to do that because that name is not important and is actually just an ID. You can however change the name of your stack to get ${StackNameILike}:${ServiceNameILike}