Docker container keeps coming back

Question

I have installed gitlab-ce on my server with the following docker.compose.yml :

gitlab:
  image: 'gitlab/gitlab-ce:latest'
  hostname: 'gitlab.devhunt.eu'
  restart: 'always'
  environment:
    # ...
  volumes:
    - '/var/lib/gitlab/config:/etc/gitlab'
    - '/var/lib/gitlab/logs:/var/log/gitlab'
    - '/var/lib/gitlab/data:/var/opt/gitlab'

I used it for a while and now I want to remove it. I noticed that when I did docker stop gitlab (which is the container name), it kept coming back so I figured it was because of the restart: always. Thus the struggle begins :

• I tried docker update --restart=no gitlab before docker stop gitlab. Still coming back.
• I did docker stop gitlab && docker rm gitlab. It got deleted but came back soon after
• I went to change the docker-compose.yml to restart: no, did docker-compose down. The container got stopped and deleted but came back soon after
• I did docker-compose up to apply the change in the compose file, checked that it was successfully taken into account with docker inspect -f "{{ .HostConfig.RestartPolicy }}" gitlab. The response was {no 0}. I did docker-compose down. Again, it got stopped and deleted but came back soon after
• I did docker stop gitlab && docker rm gitlab && docker image rm fcc1e4187c43 (the image hash I had for docker-ce). The container got stopped, deleted and the image got deleted. And it seemed that I had finally managed to kill the beast... one hour later, gitlab container was reinstalled with another image hash (3cc8e8a0764d) and the container was starting.

I would stop the docker daemon but I have production websites and databases running and I would like to avoid downtime if possible. Any idea what I can do ?

Answer 1

you-ve set the restart policy to always, set it to unless-stoped.

check the docs https://docs.docker.com/config/containers/start-containers-automatically/