Docker: Stop All Containers

Now and then, especially when working on a development environment, you need to stop multiple Docker containers. Quite often, you need to stop all of the currently running containers. I’m going to show you one of the possible ways.

Docker: Stop a Container

You need to use a container name or container ID with the docker stop command.

For example, I have an nginx load balancer container:

Based on this output, I can stop my nginx container like this:

Docker: Stop Multiple Containers

Since I also have a MariaDB container named db, I might need stop it together with nginx.

Here’s the info on the db container:

If I ever decide to stop both nginx and db together, I can do it like this:

Docker: Stop All Containers

As you can see from previous examples, docker stop simply takes a list of containers to stop. If there’s more than one container, just use space as a delimiter between container names or IDs.

This also allows us to use a clever shell expansion trick: you can some other command, and pass its output to the docker stop container.

For instance, this shows us the list of all the IDs for currently running Docker containers:

What we can do now is pass the result of this command as the parameter for the docker stop command:

And just to check, running docker ps now won’t show any running containers:

IMPORTANT: make sure you double-check what you’re doing! Specifically, run docker ps -q, compare it to docker ps, this kind of thing. Because once containers stopped you may not have an easy way to generate the list of same containers to restart.

In my case, I’m just specifying them manually as the parameters for docker start:

That’s it for today! Hope you enjoyed this quick how-to, let me know if you have any questions, Docker and whatnot!

Easily Stop and Remove all Docker Containers and Images

Cleaning up docker.

Often when I’m trying out new devtools like for instance prisma or hasura, I notice that I’m constantly adding new docker images, containers, etc.. These take up valuable space on my system and can really add up fast.

I often don’t need to come back to these docker instances later on and if I do, there’s usually no foul in just starting from scratch. Till recently I’d just google how do I remove docker containers and images then go through 1 by 1 and remove everything.

It’s not that hard to do, but it gets tedious after awhile, so I decided to figure out a better way to do it.

Here’s what I came up with:

First we need to stop all docker containers.

To do this we just run the command:

$ docker stop $(docker ps -aq)

Then we remove all the containers.

$ docker rm $(docker ps -aq)

Then we remove the images.

$ docker rmi $(docker images -q)

Bonus points: Use an alias to stop and remove all containers and images.

open up your .bashrc or .bash_aliases, or wherever you store aliases for your specific machine. For linux it’s usually just in

Then add the following alias:

alias dpurge=»docker stop $(docker ps -aq) && docker rm $(docker ps -aq) && docker rmi $(docker images -q)»

then in your terminal run:

Presto. All containers and images are gone and you’ve free’d up a couple gigs of precious hard drive space. Go have yourself a coffee or hot cocoa, you’ve earned it!

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Stop all docker containers at once on Windows

How can I stop all docker containers running on Windows?

docker stop is for 1 container only.

Any command/script to make it stop all containers?

5 Answers 5

You could create a batch-file (.bat or .cmd) with these commands in it:

If you want to run this command directly in the console, replace %%i with %i , like:

In Git Bash or Bash for Windows you can use this Linux command:

Note: this will fail if there are no containers running

For PowerShell, the command is very similar to the Linux one:

For those who are interested this can be accomplished in Powershell using

In PowerShell, you could also use this syntax

docker container stop $(docker container list -q)

If you want to stop them filtered by some criteria

or if you want to stop and remove them all together

By using pipe and foreach I avoid the error returned when there are no containers of this kind on the specific machine because docker stop or docker rm require at least one argument.

This script is used with combination of

in order to use the filter later on when you want to stop and remove the containers.

How to Stop All Docker Containers

Requirements:

You must have Docker installed in order to run the commands shown in this article.

If you don’t have Docker installed, you may check the following articles on installing Docker to install Docker on your desired Linux distribution.

If you still have any problem installing Docker, you may contact me through https://support.linuxhint.com. I will be more than happy to help.

Stopping A Running Container:

You can stop any running Docker container on your Docker host. To stop a container, you need the ID or name of the container that you want to stop.

To get the container ID and name of all the running containers, run the following command:

As you can see the container ID and name of all the running containers are listed.

Now, let’s say, you want to stop the container www1 or c52585c7a69b.

To do that, you may run one of the following commands:

The container www1 or c52585c7a69b should be stopped.

Stopping All Running Containers:

You can also stop all the running Docker containers with a single command.

To stop all the running Docker containers, run the following command:

All the running Docker containers should be stopped.

Here, docker container list -q command returns the container ID of all the running Docker containers. Then the docker container stop command stops the containers using the container IDs.

As you can see, there is no running Docker containers in the list.

Again, you can see that all the running Docker containers are stopped.

Stopping All Docker Containers:

You can also stop any Docker containers regardless of their status (running, paused etc).

To stop all the Docker containers regardless of their status, run the following command:

All the Docker containers regardless of their status should be stopped.

Here, docker container list -qa command returns the container ID of all the Docker containers regardless of their status. Then the docker container stop command stops the containers using the container IDs.

You can verify whether the containers are stopped with the following command:

As you can see, all the containers are stopped.

So, that’s how you stop all the Docker containers on your Docker host. Thanks for reading this article.

Stop and remove all docker containers [closed]

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What is the best way to create a clean slate with your Docker containers? Lots of times I feel it is easier to start from scratch, but I have a bunch of containers that I am not sure what their states are, then when I run docker rm it won’t let me because the docker container could still be in use.

10 Answers 10

Stop all the containers

Remove all the containers

Find more command here

Docker introduced new namespaces and commands which everyone should finally learn and not stick to the old habits. Here is the documentation, and here are some examples:

Deleting no longer needed containers (stopped)

Deleting no longer needed images

which means, that it only deletes images, which are not tagged and are not pointed on by «latest» — so no real images you can regularly use are deleted

Delete all volumes, which are not used by any existing container

( even stopped containers do claim volumes ). This usually cleans up dangling anon-volumes of containers have been deleted long time ago. It should never delete named volumes since the containers of those should exists / be running. Be careful, ensure your stack at least is running before going with this one

And finally, if you want to get rid if all the trash — to ensure nothing happens to your production, be sure all stacks are running and then run