You should try swarm. It solves a lot of challenges that you would otherwise have while running production services with compose. I built rove.dev to trivialize setup and deployments over SSH.
What does swarm actually do better for a single-node, single-instance deployment? (I have no experience with swarm, but on googling it, it looks like it is targeted at cluster deployments. Compose seems like the simpler choice here.)
Swarm works just as well in a single host environment. It is very similar to compose in semantics, but also does basic orchestration that you would have to hack into compose, like multiple instances of a service and blue/green deployments. And then if you need to grow later, it can of course run services on multiple hosts. The main footgun is that the Swarm management port does not have any security on it, so that needs to be locked down either with rove or manual ufw config.
