Dependencies

WorktreeOS has two related but distinct notions of “dependency”:

1. deps.<name> — external services (databases, caches, …) that aren’t part of your app’s code.
2. app.services.<name>.dependencies — startup-ordering relationships used by selective startup.

External dependencies (deps)

deps.<name> describes external dependencies with their own images, environment variables, volumes, and ports:

deps:
  db:
    image: postgres:13
    ports:
      - 5432
    environment:
      POSTGRES_USER: postgres
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: 111111
      POSTGRES_DB: api
    volumes:
      - ./.data/postgres:/var/lib/postgresql/data

• deps.<name>.ports takes numbers only; no healthcheck is performed for dependency ports.
• Reference a dependency’s generated values from an app service’s environment with ${deps.<name>.containerName} and ${deps.<name>.hostPort[<port>]}.

app:
  services:
    api:
      environment:
        DATABASE_URL: postgres://postgres:111111@${deps.db.containerName}:5432/api

Service dependencies (dependencies)

app.services.<name>.dependencies is a list of names of other services (from app.services or deps) that this service depends on. During selective startup, WorktreeOS transitively adds those dependencies to the final set and emits depends_on in the generated Compose file:

app:
  services:
    app:
      ports: [3000]
      script: [bun dev]
      dependencies: [api]
    api:
      ports: [3001]
      script: [bun dev]
      dependencies: [db]
deps:
  db:
    image: postgres:13
    ports: [5432]

Running wos up app here starts app, api, and db — the transitive closure of app’s dependencies.

Related

• Selective startup
• Targets
• Services and ports