Limit resources in docker-compose v3

I was searching for this issue a while ago. I have found my answer here. At first, I tried to implement this functionality without using docker stack, but that did not work.

Here is the piece of code which you would use to limit container's CPU/memory consumption. For additional attributes, you can search the documentation of docker.

 deploy:
  replicas: 5
  resources:
    limits: 
      cpus: "0.1"
      memory: 50M

Compose file does not recognize deploy attributes, unless you deploy the application as a stack.

you can try docker-compose --compatibility up which is CLI flag that convert v3 files to their v2 equivalent, with deploy options translated when possible.

I was wondering the same thing and found this: https://github.com/docker/compose/issues/4513

So in short it's just not possible to do that, you have to use the version 2.1 of the docker-compose format to be able to specify limits that are not ignored by docker-compose up