Is there any way to disable a service in docker-compose.yml

As of January 2021, there is a way to elegantly disable a service within the docker-compose.yml or to selectively run some services and not others. Docker Compose 1.28.0 introduced support for a profiles key. Now we can do something like:

version: "3.9"
services:
  base_image:
    ...
    profiles:
      - donotstart

Examples in the documentation describe how to use this key to create groups of containers that run together based on a --profile option on the command line. Check out the page here: https://docs.docker.com/compose/profiles/

Update

Support for profiles is working correctly in Compose V2 beta 5 (docker compose). Compose V2 beta 6 has been included in Docker Desktop 3.5.2 released 2021-07-08.

You can do it in a docker-compose.override.yaml file.

This file is automatically read by docker-compose and merged into the main docker-compose.yaml.

If you have it excluded from Git, each developer can tweak the configuration (with a few limitations) without changing the original docker-compose.yaml.

So, service foo can be disabled ad-hoc by redefining its entrypoint in docker-compose.override.yaml:

version: "3"

services:
  foo:
    entrypoint: ["echo", "Service foo disabled"]

You could simply redefine the entrypoint or command in order to replace said command with something which does nothing (/bin/true)

That would make the container exit immediately, doing nothing.

shadi adds the following tips in the comments:

If you don't want the service to get built at all, redefine the build key to point to a Dockerfile that only has:

FROM tianon/true 
ENTRYPOINT ["/true"]

5andr0 points out in the comments the top-level section x-disabled: (an extension field-like)

Far more convenient: moving disabled services to the top-level section x-disabled: instead of services:

Sections with the x- prefix will be parsed, but ignored if not used in the intended way as an extension field.

I add the following extra line to the service I want to temporarily disable:

command: echo "{put your service name here} disabled"

It starts anyway, but does nothing.

I would scale the service to 0 replicas with:

deploy:
      replicas: 0

Unfortunately as the documentation states this only works with Docker Swarm.