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.