Service cannot link to itself even with scale larger than 1

[pckhoi]

I'm trying to run a riak cluster using docker-compose. docker-compose scale riak=5 will bring up 5 nodes in 5 containers but the containers don't link to each other. This is a deal breaker and if we will have this feature in the future I suggest an intuitive syntax like this in docker-compose.yml:

web:
    build: .
    volumes:
        - .:/usr/src/app
    links:
        - riak
riak:
    build: ./riak
    links:
        - riak

Doing this currently just bring up this error message:

A service can not link to itself: riak

Docker version: 1.8.3
Docker compose version: 1.4.2

I'm sorry if doing this is already possible. Please let me know what you think.
Thanks

[pckhoi]

I just realized that docker does not really allow circular link. For now riak cluster could still work with all of the riak nodes link to a seed riak node as demonstated by https://github.com/hectcastro/docker-riak

[dnephin]

You don't actually need links between them. Links are just one mechanism for "service discovery", but containers can still communicate with each other by IP.

I think using a seed riak node and linking to it would work with docker-compose as well.

Links are actually being replaced by "networking" (see #1676), so it's unlikely there will be any major changes to links.