I made this tiny script beacuse I was annoyed that Docker Compose would fail to bring up a service if the port on the host machine was already blocked. This script (which you can alias to docker compose up or whatever you prefer), will read from a portconfig.yml file in your current directory, which should have the following structure:

services:
  - service: laravel.test
    host_port: 80
    container_port: 80
  - service: mysql
    host_port: 3306
    container_port: 3306

You don't need to specify every service! if you don't want to one of your services to be treated this way, just leave it out of the portconfig.yml

The script will attempt to bind each specified service to its specified host_port on the host machine, but if it fails, it will allow Compose to dynamically allocate the port, which Compose already does when the host_port is not specified in the docker-compose.yml file. It will then print which ports were allocated:

Service laravel.test was allocated port 32775 on the host machine
Service mysql was allocated port 32774 on the host machine

Have fun!