The official installation is a fat container and launcher manages the container lifecycle. If you need to manage the containers on your own, we mostly assume you can assemble your own tools from the Lego pieces in the box.
If I wanted to manage my containers with docker-compose, then I would build web images for the frontend – with /var/docker/launcher bootstrap app – and push those to a local docker registry. The compose file would reference those published images and a separate database image.