What is your perspective on multiple docker compose files, and you can do docker-compose up -f <file name>. You could organise in a day that all the files are in the same directory. Just wondering.

That's good too, but I really like having the separate data/cache directories. Another issue I had with the multiple Compose files is that I never knew which ones I had running and which ones I decided against running (because I shut services down but never removed the files). With the single YAML file, there's an explicit `enabled: false` line with a commit message explaining why I stopped running that service.

Might be I'm missing something, but I often go the route of using multiple Compose files, and haven't had any issue with using different data directories; I just mount the directory I want for each service, e.g. `/opt/acme/widget-builder/var/data`

Harbormaster doesn't do anything you can't otherwise do, it just makes stuff easy for you.

I understand your problem. I have seen solve that with docker_compose_$ENV.yaml. You could set ENV variable and then the appropriate file would be called.

Hmm, what did you set the variable to? Prod/staging/etc? I'm not sure how that documents whether you want to keep running the service or not.