The idea is that you have a core structure that is used in both local/dev environment and the prod environment, with just the override applying changes. For example, your local override might have the "build" configuration, whereas the dev environment or production environment docker-compose should not have that configuration (assuming you are pulling from a private registry). That single core docker-compose.yml can be copied to any environment it needs and it should just run the app, but if you really, really need to override something for a specific reason, it's not hard to do it without modifying the core docker-compose.yml.