Painless Docker - 2nd Edition

Stopping Containers

You can use the stop subcommand in the following way to stop one or multiple containers:

docker stop [OPTIONS] CONTAINER [CONTAINER...]

Example:

docker stop my_nginx

By default, the docker stop command asks the container to terminate gracefully: it sends SIGTERM to the container's PID 1 and waits (10 seconds by default) for the process to exit. If the process is still running after the wait period, Docker sends SIGKILL to force termination. You can change the wait time with the --time (or -t) flag:

# start the container again
docker start my_nginx

# stop the container after 20 seconds (wait 20s for graceful shutdown)
docker stop --time=20 my_nginx
# or