How to stop all docker containers
How to stop all docker containers
How to Stop Docker Containers
This docker tutorial discusses methods to stop a single docker container, multiple docker containers or all running docker containers at once. You’ll also learn to gracefully stop a docker container.
To stop a docker container, all you have to do is to use the container ID or container name in the following fashion:
You may also use docker container stop container_id_or_name command but that’s one additional word in the command and it doesn’t provide any additional benefits so stick with docker stop.
But there is more to stopping a docker container that you should know, specially if you are a Docker beginner.
Practical examples for stopping docker container
I’ll discuss various aspects around stopping a docker container in this tutorial:
Before you see that, you should know how to get the container name or ID.
You can list all the running docker containers with the docker ps command. Without any options, the docker ps command only shows the running containers.
The output also gives you the container name and container ID. You can use either of these two to stop a container.
Now let’s go about stopping containers.
1. Stop a docker container
To stop a specific container, use its ID or name with docker stop command:
The output should have been more descriptive but it just shows the container name or ID whichever you provided:
You can use the docker stop command on an already stopped container. It won’t throw any errors or a different output.
If the status is Exited, it means the container is not running any more.
2. Stop multiple docker containers
You can stop multiple docker containers at once as well. You just have to provide the container names and IDs.
As previously, the output will simply show the name or ID of the containers:
3. Stop all containers associated with an image
So far what you saw stopping containers by explicitely mentioning their name or ID.
What if you want to stop all running containers of a certain docker image? Imagine a scenario where you want to remove a docker image but you’ll have to stop all the associated running containers.
You may provide the container names or IDs one by one but that’s time consuming. What you can do is to filter all the running containers based on their base image.
Just replace the IMAGE_NAME by your docker image name and you should be able to stop all running containers associated with that image.
4. Stop all running docker containers
You may face a situation where you are required to stop all running containers. For example if you want to remove all containers in Docker, you should stop them beforehand.
To do that, you can use something similar to what you saw in the previous section. Just remove the image part.
5. Stop a container gracefully
To be honest, docker stops a container gracefully by default. When you use the docker stop command, it gives the container 10 seconds before forcefully killing it.
It doesn’t mean that it always takes 10 seconds to stop a container. It’s just that if the container is running some processes, it gets 10 seconds to stop the process and exit.
Docker stop command first sends the SIGTERM command. If the conainer is stopped in this period, it sends the SIGKILL command. A process may ignore the SIGTERM but SIGKILL will kill the process immediately.
In the end…
I think that this much information covers the topic very well. You know plenty of things about stopping a docker container.
Stay tuned for more docker tips and tutorials. If you have questions or suggestions, please let me know in the comment section.
How to Stop All Docker Containers
Requirements:
You must have Docker installed in order to run the commands shown in this article.
If you don’t have Docker installed, you may check the following articles on installing Docker to install Docker on your desired Linux distribution.
If you still have any problem installing Docker, you may contact me through https://support.linuxhint.com. I will be more than happy to help.
Stopping A Running Container:
You can stop any running Docker container on your Docker host. To stop a container, you need the ID or name of the container that you want to stop.
To get the container ID and name of all the running containers, run the following command:
As you can see the container ID and name of all the running containers are listed.
Now, let’s say, you want to stop the container www1 or c52585c7a69b.
To do that, you may run one of the following commands:
The container www1 or c52585c7a69b should be stopped.
Stopping All Running Containers:
You can also stop all the running Docker containers with a single command.
To stop all the running Docker containers, run the following command:
All the running Docker containers should be stopped.
As you can see, there is no running Docker containers in the list.
Again, you can see that all the running Docker containers are stopped.
Stopping All Docker Containers:
You can also stop any Docker containers regardless of their status (running, paused etc).
To stop all the Docker containers regardless of their status, run the following command:
All the Docker containers regardless of their status should be stopped.
You can verify whether the containers are stopped with the following command:
As you can see, all the containers are stopped.
So, that’s how you stop all the Docker containers on your Docker host. Thanks for reading this article.
Docker: Stop All Containers
Now and then, especially when working on a development environment, you need to stop multiple Docker containers. Quite often, you need to stop all of the currently running containers. I’m going to show you one of the possible ways.
Docker: Stop a Container
You need to use a container name or container ID with the docker stop command.
For example, I have an nginx load balancer container:
Based on this output, I can stop my nginx container like this:
Docker: Stop Multiple Containers
Since I also have a MariaDB container named db, I might need stop it together with nginx.
Here’s the info on the db container:
If I ever decide to stop both nginx and db together, I can do it like this:
Docker: Stop All Containers
As you can see from previous examples, docker stop simply takes a list of containers to stop. If there’s more than one container, just use space as a delimiter between container names or IDs.
This also allows us to use a clever shell expansion trick: you can some other command, and pass its output to the docker stop container.
For instance, this shows us the list of all the IDs for currently running Docker containers:
What we can do now is pass the result of this command as the parameter for the docker stop command:
And just to check, running docker ps now won’t show any running containers:
In my case, I’m just specifying them manually as the parameters for docker start:
That’s it for today! Hope you enjoyed this quick how-to, let me know if you have any questions, Docker and whatnot!
Stop all docker containers at once on Windows
How can I stop all docker containers running on Windows?
docker stop is for 1 container only.
Any command/script to make it stop all containers?
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You could create a batch-file (.bat or .cmd) with these commands in it:
In Git Bash or Bash for Windows you can use this Linux command:
Note: this will fail if there are no containers running
For PowerShell, the command is very similar to the Linux one:
For those who are interested this can be accomplished in Powershell using
In PowerShell, you could also use this syntax
If the motivation of the question is to recover the memory occupied by Docker (in my case, this was why I arrived at this page), I found that the only way was to stop Docker Desktop completely. You do that by right-clicking the whale icon in the notification area (bottom right) > Quit Docker Desktop. When you restart Docker Desktop, all the containers reappear, and Docker even sets them to up again automatically.
If you want to stop them filtered by some criteria
or if you want to stop and remove them all together
By using pipe and foreach I avoid the error returned when there are no containers of this kind on the specific machine because docker stop or docker rm require at least one argument.
This script is used with combination of
in order to use the filter later on when you want to stop and remove the containers.
Use Docker Stop Containers Without Screwing Things Up!
Read more tutorials by Adam Listek!
Table of Contents
Having trouble with Docker stop containers? Finding the correct way to stop a container is difficult with the ability to create many different containers. In this article, you will learn Docker commands to stop a container or all containers.
Read on to learn more!
Table of Contents
Prerequisites
To follow along with this tutorial, be sure you have the following:
Ending Containers with the docker stop Containers Command
Let’s get started with the first command: the docker stop containers command and how it accomplishes stopping containers.
What if you have multiple running containers, and you would like to stop those? The docker stop containers command supports stopping multiple container IDs, one at a time.
First, list all containers via the docker ps command and pass the container IDs to the docker stop containers command, as shown below.
The docker stop containers command uses the SIGTERM signal. Linux signals inform a process of an event, but it is up to the process to decide how to act on a given signal.
When using the SIGTERM signal, Docker uses the signal to gracefully stop a process by waiting for a default 10 seconds before sending the SIGKILL signal, which terminates the process immediately.
Stopping a Container Using Process Signals
You learned about Docker’s default behavior (stop signal), with the docker stop containers command, when stopping a container. But you may not want the default behavior. Instead, you can instruct Docker to use alternative stop signals.
Exiting Containers Immediately with docker kill
There will be times when you will want to exit containers without allowing them a grace period. The docker kill command immediately stops a container.
Stopping and Removing a Container with docker rm
By default, when you create a container, that container is built the same as before: it is idempotent. Removing a container will have minimal impact, and with that in mind, docker rm can force-stop and remove a container. Docker issues a SIGKILL signal to the main process and removes the container from the list of available containers on your Docker installation.
If the container must keep the changed internal files or its state must be kept, then removing a container will destroy those changes. Beware of potential screw-ups!
Now that the container is stopped issuing the docker rm command will remove the container entirely.
Stopping Docker Containers with Docker Compose
Docker commands are typically used on a single container, but you can create a service with multiple containers working in concert with each other. The Docker Compose tool allows you to configure a service comprised of multiple containers to work together.
As the containers within a service are designed to work together, it is best to stop the entire service itself gracefully instead of any individual container.
If you have a service running with multiple containers, [docker-compose stop] stops the service without removing the containers or the service. Follow along below to create a Docker Compose service, start the service, and ultimately stop the service gracefully.
1. Create a directory to store your configuration file. In this example, the directory C:\Articles\Ubuntu will store the file.
2. Next, create the file docker-compose.yml file, containing the following configuration. The below Docker Compose file creates a service with two Ubuntu containers, and when brought up, the containers do not immediately exit.
4. In the same terminal session and directory, issue the command docker-compose stop to end the service and containers gracefully.
Conclusion
Docker containers are a powerful tool to create unique and segmented environments for development and production use. In this article, you have learned several ways Docker stops one or more, even all, containers. You also learned about the default stop signal Docker uses and how to change it.
With this knowledge, you now know the ins and outs of stopping Docker containers and how not to screw up when it is time to stop running containers. How do you plan to stop your containers from now on, having this newfound knowledge?
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