When running demos and experimenting with containers I always clear down my environment. It’s good practice to leave a clean environment once you’ve finished working.

To do this I blow all my containers away, usually by running the docker stop command.

But there’s a quicker way to stop containers, the docker kill command.

Time the difference for yourself: –

docker run -d -p 15789:1433 --env ACCEPT_EULA=Y --env SA_PASSWORD=Testing11@@ --name testcontainer microsoft/mssql-server-linux

First try the stop command: –

docker stop testcontainer

And then try the kill command: –

docker kill testcontainer

The kill command is pretty much instant right? But what’s the difference?

Well, according to the documentation, the stop command sends a SIGTERM signal to the main process within the container whereas the kill command sends a SIGKILL signal.

There’s a really good article here explaining the differences between the two signals but from what I can gather, the stop command gracefully shuts down the process within the container and the kill command just stops it dead.

Thanks for reading.