docker-compose start "ERROR: No containers to start"

The reason why you saw the error is that docker-compose start and docker-compose restart assume that the containers already exist.

If you want to build and start containers, use

docker-compose up

If you only want to build the containers, use

docker-compose up --no-start

Afterwards, docker-compose {start,restart,stop} should work as expected.

There used to be a docker-compose create command, but it is now deprecated in favor of docker-compose up --no-start.

The issue here is that you haven't actually created the containers. You will have to create these containers before running them. You could use the docker-compose up instead, that will create the containers and then start them.

Or you could run docker-compose create to create the containers and then run the docker-compose start to start them.