How to get docker-compose to always re-create containers from fresh images

Question

My docker images are built on a Jenkins CI server and are pushed to our private Docker Registry  My goal is to provision environments with docker-compose which always start the originally built state of the images   I am currently using docker-compose 1 3 2 as well as 1 4 0 on different machines but we also used older versions previously    I always used the docker-compose pull  amp  amp  docker-compose up -d commands to fetch the fresh images from the registry and start them up  I believe my preferred behaviour was working as expected up to a certain point in time  but since then docker-compose up started to re-run previously stopped containers instead of starting the originally built images every time    Is there a way to get rid of this behaviour  Could that way be one which is wired in the docker-compose yml configuration file to not depend  not forgetting  something on the command line upon every invocation   ps  Besides finding a way to achieve my goal  I would also love to know a bit more about the background of this behaviour  I think the basic idea of Docker is to build an immutable infrastructure  The current behaviour of docker-compose just seem to plain clash with this approach   or do I miss some points here

User · Answer

The only solution that worked for me was this command :

docker-compose build --no-cache

This will automatically pull fresh image from repo and won't use the cache version that is prebuild with any parameters you've been using before.

User · Answer

By current official documentation there is a short cut that stops and removes containers  networks  volumes  and images created by up  if they are already stopped or partially removed and so on  then it will do the trick too   docker-compose down   Then if you have new changes on your images or Dockerfiles use   docker-compose build --no-cache   Finally docker-compose up  In one command  docker-compose down  amp  amp  docker-compose build --no-cache  amp  amp  docker-compose up

User · Answer

You can pass --force-recreate to docker compose up  which should use fresh containers   I think the reasoning behind reusing containers is to preserve any changes during development  Note that Compose does something similar with volumes  which will also persist between container recreation  a recreated container will attach to its predecessor s volumes   This can be helpful  for example  if you have a Redis container used as a cache and you don t want to lose the cache each time you make a small change  At other times it s just confusing   I don t believe there is any way you can force this from the Compose file   Arguably it does clash with immutable infrastructure principles  The counter-argument is probably that you don t use Compose in production  yet   Also  I m not sure I agree that immutable infra is the basic idea of Docker  although it s certainly a good use case selling point

User · Answer

docker-compose build   If there is something new it will be rebuilt

User · Answer

docker-compose up --build   OR   docker-compose build --no-cache

User · Answer

docker-compose up --force-recreate is one option  but if you re using it for CI  I would start the build with docker-compose rm -f to stop and remove the containers and volumes  then follow it with pull and up    This is what I use   docker-compose rm -f docker-compose pull docker-compose up --build -d   Run some tests   tests docker-compose stop -t 1   The reason containers are recreated is to preserve any data volumes that might be used  and it also happens to make up a lot faster    If you re doing CI you don t want that  so just removing everything should get you want you want   Update  use up --build which was added in docker-compose 1 7

User · Answer

I claimed 3 5gb space in ubuntu AWS through this  clean docker  docker stop   docker ps -qa   amp  amp  docker system prune -af --volumes  build again  docker build   docker-compose build docker-compose up

[docker] How to get docker-compose to always re-create containers from fresh images?

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