Building, Starting, Stopping Containers

Building the Containers

We can use the following commands to build the containers first. This command will build the containers specified in the docker-compose.yml file. To use a different configuration file, use the -f option.

$ docker-compose build
$ docker-compose -f anotherfile.yml build

Start All the Containers

We can run Compose's up command to start all the containers specified in the docker-compose.yml file. Make sure to run this command in the same folder as docker-compose.yml.

$ docker-compose up
Creating network "net-10.9.0.0" with the default driver
Creating host-10.9.0.7 ... done
Creating host-10.9.0.6 ... done
Creating host-10.9.0.5 ... done
Attaching to host-10.9.0.6, host-10.9.0.7, host-10.9.0.5
... (blocked here) ...

Stopping All the Containers

To stop all the containers, we can use use Ctrl-C to stop the "docker-compose up" command, that will stop all the containers, but without removing them. If we want to removing them, we can run Compose's down command.

Attaching to host-10.9.0.6, host-10.9.0.7, host-10.9.0.5
^CGracefully stopping... (press Ctrl+C again to force)
Stopping host-10.9.0.5 ...
Stopping host-10.9.0.7 ...
Stopping host-10.9.0.6 ...

$ docker-compose down
Removing host-10.9.0.5 ... done
Removing host-10.9.0.7 ... done
Removing host-10.9.0.6 ... done
Removing network net-10.9.0.0

Another way to do this is to go to a different terminal (but still in the same folder as docker-compose.yml), and run Compose's down command. That will stop and removing all the containers.

$ docker-compose down
Stopping host-10.9.0.7 ... done
Stopping host-10.9.0.6 ... done
Stopping host-10.9.0.5 ... done
Removing host-10.9.0.7 ... done
Removing host-10.9.0.6 ... done
Removing host-10.9.0.5 ... done
Removing network net-10.9.0.0