The first problem you'll encounter here is if you're using a language that keeps dependencies in a separate place (virtualenv, central cache location, etc.). You have to figure out how that works and mount that location as a separate volume, or else you'll be constantly recompiling everything when your container is recreated. Using a bind mount for the project files is also annoying because docker-compose makes no effort to sync your uid/gid, so you have all sorts of annoying permissions issues between local/container. And installing packages into your container that doesn't have an init process is... annoying at best. You can use sysbox to get one, but you're not really "just using docker compose" at that point.