---
title: Deploy to Swarm
keywords: swarm, swarm services, stacks
description: Learn how to describe and deploy a simple application on Docker Swarm.
aliases:
  - /get-started/part4/
  - /get-started/swarm-deploy/
  - /guides/deployment-orchestration/swarm-deploy/
summary: |
  Discover how to deploy and manage Docker containers using Docker Swarm.
tags: [deploy]
params:
  time: 10 minutes
---

{{% include "swarm-mode.md" %}}

## Prerequisites

- Download and install Docker Desktop as described in [Get Docker](/get-started/get-docker.md).
- Work through containerizing an application in [Docker workshop part 2](/get-started/workshop/02_our_app.md)
- Make sure that Swarm is enabled on your Docker Desktop by typing `docker system info`, and looking for a message `Swarm: active` (you might have to scroll up a little).

  If Swarm isn't running, simply type `docker swarm init` in a shell prompt to set it up.

## Introduction

Now that you've demonstrated that the individual components of your application run as stand-alone containers and shown how to deploy it using Kubernetes, you can look at how to arrange for them to be managed by Docker Swarm. Swarm provides many tools for scaling, networking, securing and maintaining your containerized applications, above and beyond the abilities of containers themselves.

In order to validate that your containerized application works well on Swarm, you'll use Docker Desktop's built in Swarm environment right on your development machine to deploy your application, before handing it off to run on a full Swarm cluster in production. The Swarm environment created by Docker Desktop is fully featured, meaning it has all the Swarm features your app will enjoy on a real cluster, accessible from the convenience of your development machine.

## Describe apps using stack files

Swarm never creates individual containers like you did in the previous step of this tutorial. Instead, all Swarm workloads are scheduled as services, which are scalable groups of containers with added networking features maintained automatically by Swarm. Furthermore, all Swarm objects can and should be described in manifests called stack files. These YAML files describe all the components and configurations of your Swarm app, and can be used to create and destroy your app in any Swarm environment.

Now you can write a simple stack file to run and manage your Todo app, the container `getting-started` image created in [Part 2](02_our_app.md) of the tutorial. Place the following in a file called `bb-stack.yaml`:

{{% include "swarm-compose-compat.md" %}}

```yaml
version: "3.7"

services:
  bb-app:
    image: getting-started
    ports:
      - "8000:3000"
```

In this Swarm YAML file, there is one object, a `service`, describing a scalable group of identical containers. In this case, you'll get just one container (the default), and that container will be based on your `getting-started` image created in [Part 2](02_our_app.md) of the tutorial. In addition, you've asked Swarm to forward all traffic arriving at port 8000 on your development machine to port 3000 inside our getting-started container.