Auto remove container with docker-compose.yml

I haven't found any option to help you define this behavior in the docker-compose.yml file and I think the explanation is the that it will break how some of the docker-compose ... commands are supposed to work.

More on this up/down , start/stop thing:

docker-compose up builds, (re)creates, starts, and attaches to containers for a service.

Since your images are built and the containers of your service have started, you can then use docker-compose stop and docker-compose start to start/stop your service. This is different from docker-compose down which:

Stops containers and removes containers, networks, volumes, and images created by up.

Problem with what you are trying to do:

If you docker-compose up and one of your containers finishes its task and gets (auto)removed, then you can't docker-compose stop and docker-compose start again. The removed container will not be there to start it again.

---

You might want to take a look at:

• docker-compose: option to automaticaly remove container after run in docker-compose.yml
• What is the difference between docker-compose up and docker-compose start?

Simply run docker-compose up && docker-compose rm -fsv 🙂

👉 https://docs.docker.com/compose/reference/rm

It's been quite some time since this question was posted, but I thought it would be informative to share something that worked for my case, in 2022 :) But keep in mind that this solution still does not remove old containers, as the original author intended to achieve.

docker-compose up --force-recreate -V

In my case, I have a small Redis cluster where I want the data to be completely erased after I stop the servers. Only using --force-recreate didn't do the trick, because the anonymous volume is still reused. That's where -V comes in.

My solution to this was to create a little bash script that automatically removes containers afterwards.

If you're on macOS, you can put this script in usr/local/bin. Assuming it's named dco, you can then run chmod +x usr/local/bin/dco to make it executable. On Windows, I have no idea how to get this working, but on Linux it should be similar.

#! /bin/bash

# check for -d, --detached
DETACHED=false
for (( i=1; i <= "$#"; i++ )); do
  ARG="${!i}"
  case "$ARG" in
    -d|--detach)
      DETACHED=true
      break
      ;;
  esac
done

if [[ $1 == "run" ]] && [[ $DETACHED == false ]]; then
    docker-compose run --rm "${@:2}"
elif [[ $1 == "up" ]] && [[ $DETACHED == false ]]; then
    docker-compose up "${@:2}"; docker-compose down
else
    docker-compose "${@:1}"
fi

Edit: Updated the script so that detached mode will work normally, added break to the loop suggested by artu-hnrq