Docker Tip #45: Docker Compose Stop vs Down

You can stop your containers using the stop or down command, but the down command does more than stopping your containers.
The docker-compose stop
command will stop your containers, but it won’t remove them.
The docker-compose down
command will stop your containers, but it also removes the stopped containers as well as any networks that were created.
You can take down
1 step further and add the -v
flag to remove all volumes too. This is great for doing a full blown reset on your environment by running docker-compose down -v
.
There’s other neat things you could with the down
command. Run the docker-compose down --help
command to learn more about them.