Cannot stop or restart a docker container

Question

When trying to stop or restart a docker container I m getting the following error message     docker restart 5ba0a86f36ea Error response from daemon  Cannot restart container 5ba0a86f36ea   2  Container does not exist  container destroyed Error  failed to restart containers   5ba0a86f36ea    But when I run    docker logs -f 5ba0a86f36ea   I can see the logs  so obviously the container does exist  Any ideas   Edit   sorry  I forgot to mention this   When I run docker ps -a I see the container as up and running  However the application inside it is malfunctioning so I want to restart it  or just get a fresh version of that application online  But when I can t stop and remove the container  I also can t get a new application up and running  which would be listening to the same port

User · Answer

Enjoy  sudo aa-remove-unknown  This is what worked for me

User · Answer

I couldn t locate boot2docker in my machine  So  I came up with something that worked for me    sudo systemctl restart docker socket docker service   docker rm -f  lt container id gt   Check if it helps you as well

User · Answer

Check if there is any zombie process using  top  command   docker ps   grep  lt  lt container name gt  gt     Get the container id   ps -ef   grep  lt  lt container id gt  gt   ps -ef grep defunct   grep java   And kill the container by Parent PID

User · Answer

All the docker   start   restart   stop   rm --force   kill commands may not work if the container is stuck  You can always restart the docker daemon  However  if you have other containers running  that may not be the option  What you can do is   ps aux   grep  lt  lt container id gt  gt    awk   print  1  2     The output contains    lt  lt user gt  gt  lt  lt process id gt  gt    Then kill the process associated with the container like so   sudo kill -9  lt  lt process id from above command gt  gt    That will kill the container and you can start a new container with the right image

User · Answer

I had the same problem on a windows host machine and none of the other options here worked for me  I ended up just needing to delete the physical container folder  which was located here   C  ProgramData Docker containers  container guid    I had stopped the docker service first just to be safe and when I restarted it  the broken containers were now gone and I was able to create new ones  I suspect the same will work on a linux host machine  but I do not know where the container folders are kept on that OS

User · Answer

in my case  i couldn t delete container created with nomad jobs  there s no output for the docker logs  lt ContainerID gt  and  in general  it looks like frozen  until now the solution is  sudo service docker restart  may someone suggest better one

User · Answer

Worth knowing   If you are running an ENTRYPOINT script     the script will work with the shebang      bin bash -x   But will stop the container from stopping with      bin bash -xe

User · Answer

For anyone on a Mac who has Docker Desktop installed  I was able to just click the tray icon and say Restart Docker  Once it restarted was able to delete the containers

User · Answer

That looks like docker docker issues 12738  seen with docker 1 6 or 1 7   Some container fail to stop properly  and the restart     We are seeing this issue a lot in our users hosts when they upgraded from 1 5 0 to 1 6 0    After the upgrade  some containers cannot be stopped  giving 500 Server Error  Internal Server Error   Cannot stop container xxxxx   2  Container does not exist  container destroyed    or forced destroyed  giving 500 Server Error  Internal Server Error   Could not kill running container  cannot remove -  2  Container does not exist  container destroyed       The processes are still running on the host    Sometimes  it works after restarting the docker daemon    There are some workarounds      I ve tried all remote API calls for that unkillable container and here are results          json  stats  changes  top  logs returned valid responses   stop  pause  wait  kill reported 404             After I finished with remote API  I double-checked docker ps  the container was still there   but then I retried docker kill and it worked  The container got killed and I could remove it    Or      What worked was to restart boot2docker on my host  Then docker rm -f     boot2docker stop   boot2docker start   docker rm -f 1f061139ba04

User · Answer

If you re on Ubuntu  make sure docker-compose isn t installed as snap  This will cause all kinds of random issues  including the above  Remove the snap  sudo snap remove docker-compose  And install manually from compose repository  Docker compose installation instruction

[docker] Cannot stop or restart a docker container

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