Services Overview

Every Playspec defines one or more services — the individual containers that make up your development environment. Services are classified into two types that determine how they are built, run, and managed.

Service Types

Static Services

A static service runs a pre-built Docker image without any source code mounting.

Feature	Static Service
Source code mounting	❌ No
Auto-sync (git pull)	❌ No
Production mode toggle	❌ No
Requires a Playzone	❌ No

Use for: Databases, caches, message brokers, and other infrastructure components that run unchanged Docker images.

Examples: postgres:16, redis:7, rabbitmq:3-management, elasticsearch:8

Dynamic Services

A dynamic service is backed by source code from a Playzone. It supports two runtime modes:

Dev Mode (Default)

Feature	Dev Mode
Source code mounting	✅ Yes — code is mounted into the container at the configured working directory
Auto-sync (git pull)	✅ Yes — Playguard pulls new commits when the working tree is clean
Git operations	✅ Yes — commit, push, pull directly from the container terminal

Production Mode

Feature	Production Mode
Source code mounting	❌ No — the service runs from a built Docker image
Auto-sync (git pull)	❌ No
Automatic rebuild	❌ No — manual re-creation required when new commits land

See Advanced Configuration for details on toggling production mode.

Service Classification Flow

When you provide a Docker Compose YAML to create a Playspec, the platform:

1. Parses the YAML and extracts all service definitions
2. Presents each service for classification
3. Requires you to mark each service as either static or dynamic
4. Validates dynamic services have a linked Playzone, Dockerfile path, and working directory
5. Validates static services have an image specified

Container Mapping

The platform maps each service name in your Compose YAML to a Docker container. The resulting containers follow Docker Compose naming conventions under the Playground's compose project name:

{compose_project}_{service_name}_1

For example, a service named web in a Playground with project pg-42-my-app would run as pg-42-my-app_web_1.

Services communicate with each other using standard Docker Compose networking — use the service name as the hostname for internal communication (e.g., db, redis, web).