Stop docker containers with name matching a pattern

Question

I'm using puckel/docker-airflow with CeleryExecutor. It launches a total of 5 containers named like this

docker-airflow_flower_1_de2035f778e6
docker-airflow_redis_1_49d2e710e82b
..

While development, I often have to stop all above containers. However, I can't do a docker stop $(docker ps -aq) since I have other containers running on my machine too.

Is there a way to stop all containers who's names match a given pattern (for instance all containers who's names start with docker-airflow in above)?

**See Also**: [Stopping Docker containers by image name](https://stackoverflow.com/q/32073971/1366033) — KyleMit, Nov 18 '20 at 14:07

y2k-shubham · Accepted Answer · 2019-07-19T05:10:55.520

29

From this article by @james-coyle, following command works for me

docker ps --filter name=docker-airflow* --filter status=running -aq | xargs docker stop

I believe docker CLI natively does not provide such a functionality, so we have to rely on filtering and good-old bash PIPE and xargs

UPDATE-1

Note that depending on your environment, you might have to do these

run docker commands with sudo (just prefix both docker .. commands above with sudo)
enclose name pattern in double-quotes --filter name="docker-airflow*" (particularly on zsh)

edited Jul 19 '19 at 05:10

answered Jul 11 '19 at 23:26

y2k-shubham

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This didn't work for me unless I added quotes around the search string, e.g. docker ps --filter name="docker-airflow*" – Coffee and Code Jan 09 '21 at 16:33

score 13 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 09 '21 at 19:56

Better late than never ;). From this article. The following works for me:

Stop containers with names matching a given pattern:

$ docker container stop $(docker container ls -q --filter name=<pattern>)

On the other hand, if we want to start containers with names matching a given pattern:

$ docker container start $(docker container ls --all -q --filter name=<pattern>)

NOTE: For different environments related tips, @y2k-shubham's update is a good starting point.

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 28 '22 at 17:01

Another approach using grep and docker ps:

To stop docker container matching the given pattern/list of pattern":

docker ps | grep  -E "name_1|name_2|name_3"  |  awk '{print $1}' | xargs docker stop

To stop docker container excluding the given pattern/list of pattern:

docker ps | grep  -Ev "name_1|name_2|name_3" |  awk '{print $1}' | xargs docker stop

Reference: Grep

Stop docker containers with name matching a pattern

3 Answers3