How to restart a single container with docker-compose

It is very simple: Use the command:

docker-compose restart worker

You can set the time to wait for stop before killing the container (in seconds)

docker-compose restart -t 30 worker

Note that this will restart the container but without rebuilding it. If you want to apply your changes and then restart, take a look at the other answers.

The other answers to restarting a single node are on target, docker-compose restart worker. That will bounce that container, but not include any changes, even if you rebuilt it separately. You can manually stop, rm, create, and start, but there are much easier methods.

If you've updated your code, you can do the build and reload in a single step with:

docker-compose up --detach --build

That will first rebuild your images from any changed code, which is fast if there are no changes since the cache is reused. And then it only replaces the changed containers. If your downloaded images are stale, you can precede the above command with:

docker-compose pull

To download any changed images first (the containers won't be restarted until you run a command like the up above). Doing an initial stop is unnecessary.

And to only do this for a single service, follow the up or pull command with the services you want to specify, e.g.:

docker-compose up --detach --build worker

Here's a quick example of the first option, the Dockerfile is structured to keep the frequently changing parts of the code near the end. In fact the requirements are pulled in separately for the pip install since that file rarely changes. And since the nginx and redis containers were up-to-date, they weren't restarted. Total time for the entire process was under 6 seconds:

$ time docker-compose -f docker-compose.nginx-proxy.yml up --detach --buildBuilding counterStep 1 : FROM python:2.7-alpine ---> fc479af56697Step 2 : WORKDIR /app ---> Using cache ---> d04d0d6d98f1Step 3 : ADD requirements.txt /app/requirements.txt ---> Using cache ---> 9c4e311f3f0cStep 4 : RUN pip install -r requirements.txt ---> Using cache ---> 85b878795479Step 5 : ADD . /app ---> 63e3d4e6b539Removing intermediate container 9af53c35d8feStep 6 : EXPOSE 80 ---> Running in a5b3d3f80cd4 ---> 4ce3750610a9Removing intermediate container a5b3d3f80cd4Step 7 : CMD gunicorn app:app -b 0.0.0.0:80 --log-file - --access-logfile - --workers 4 --keep-alive 0 ---> Running in 0d69957bda4c ---> d41ff1635cb7Removing intermediate container 0d69957bda4cSuccessfully built d41ff1635cb7counter_nginx_1 is up-to-datecounter_redis_1 is up-to-dateRecreating counter_counter_1real    0m5.959suser    0m0.508ssys     0m0.076s

To restart a service with changes here are the steps that I performed:

docker-compose stop -t 1 workerdocker-compose build workerdocker-compose up --no-start workerdocker-compose start worker