Compose: Question: Is it possible to recreate containers manually?

[rockymeza]

Hi,

Is there a way to manually recreate containers (without running up)?

I find that I often run into the following situation:

$ docker-compose up
# Oh no there are errors in one of my containers, I want to rebuild it.
^C # shut down everything
$ # Change Dockerfile
$ docker-compose build
$ docker-compose up

I believe this is the recommended way of using compose, and I think it's a good interface for normal development, but I think that when I'm settings up my Dockerfile and the docker-compose.yml, I would much rather this sort of interface:

$ docker-compose start
# Oh no there are in my web container, I need to rebuild it.
$ docker-compose stop web # leaves the other non-dependent services running
$ # fix the web container Dockerfile
$ docker-compose build web
$ docker-compose start web

This doesn't work though, because the containers haven't been recreated. This has bitten me and my colleagues several times, but running docker-compose up just to have one of the containers recreated, is quite slow.

Thanks,

[dnephin]

I do something like this:

docker-compose build
docker-compose up -d  # runs containers, but returns immediately
# Oops, something needs to be changed
docker-compose stop web
# Make changes
docker-compose build web
docker-compose up -d --no-recreate web

related to #741

I kind of think we should remove start. It's not really useful, and it's just an alias for docker start

[rockymeza]

@dnephin, doesn't the second call to up stop all of the running containers and then restart them?

[aanand]

This will recreate just web:

$ docker-compose stop web
$ docker-compose build web
$ docker-compose up -d --no-deps web

[rockymeza]

Thanks @aanand!

[paulhauner]

I am not sure why you're using the --no-recreate flag. When I want to make changes to web I definitely want to re-create the image, otherwise I end up running the same image.

I use:

docker-compose build
docker-compose up -d  # runs containers, but returns immediately
# Oops, something needs to be changed
docker-compose stop web
# Make changes
docker-compose build web
docker-compose up -d web

[mrclay]

Just confirming @paulhauner's comment, --no-recreate restarted my old image with no changes.