How to stop TeamCity from rebuilding docker dependencies every time?

Rather than changing the source code of your build (parameterized docker-compose.yml) and brute-force your build every time, you could consider building the containers independently while tagging them with a version increment, and labels. After the build store the images in a local registry. Use docker-compose to suit your runtime needs. docker-compose can use multiple yaml files, so if you need other images for a particular build, just pull the other images you need. For production use another yaml file that composes the system to run. Add LABEL to your Dockerfile. See http://label-schema.org//rc1/ for a set of labels that suit your needs.

I know this is old question but I have come across this issue and you can't do what sounds reasonable i.e. get recent green builds without rebuilding. This is partly because of what the snapshot dependencies are designed to do by Jetbrains.

The basic idea is that dependencies are for synchronized revisions of code: that is if you build Compose at a certain time, it will need to use not just its own versions of source code at that point in time but also the code for all the dependencies that also comes from that point of time, regardless of whether anything significant has changed.

In my example, there were always changes because the same repo was used for lots of projects and had unrelated changes that would not trigger a build but would make the project appear behind and cause a build.

If your dependencies have NOT changed and show no changes pending, then they shouldn't build. In this case, you need to tick "Do not run new build if there is a suitable one". "Enforce Revisions Synchronization" is slightly confusing. If ticked, it will find older builds that match the first build after your build was triggered. If unticked, it can use newer builds.