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Services

Lando services are our distillation of Docker containers into their most important options combined with some special sauce to setup good networking, certificates and SSH keys as well as options to run build steps and provide low level overrides.

You can use the top-level services config in your Landofile to define and configure a service.

Configuration

Services will generally take the below form:

Landofile

yaml
services:
  my-service:
    type: "my-type"
    api: 3
    ...

name

my-service is the name of the service and you can generally name the service whatever you want. We like short and kabob-cased names though.

api

api is the Service API version. If ommitted it will default to the app runtime.

However we highly recommend you do not omit it! 😃

type

type is the kind of service. By default Lando 3 has one type: lando

However, you can install plugins to get more types such as php:8.2 or postgres:12.

...

... denotes additional configuration options that can vary based on the type of service you are using and other plugins you may have installed.

For these options you will want to consult the documentation for the specific service type or plugin.

Lando Service

As mentioned above Lando 3 core ships with a single general purpose service called lando. This service is similar to and replaces the now DEPRECATED compose service.

All other api: 3 services are built on top of this service so it's worth examining its features as they are available in all other downstream services. Some of its key features are:

That said, it's almost always better to use a pre-built supported service.

Supported Services

Visit the plugins page for a list of available services.

Default service

Some other Lando plugins, such as the one that powers events will assume a default service in some scenarios although it is not clear how this is set or determined. So, this is how that is determined

  1. If there is a service called appserver, as is the case in most recipes, then that will be the default service.
  2. If there is not a service called appserver, then the first service listed in your .lando.yml will be the default service.

In Lando 4 you can choose the default service, now called the primary service by setting primary: true in that service.