How to rebuild and update a container without downtime with docker-compose?

from the manual docker-compose restart

If you make changes to your docker-compose.yml configuration these changes will not be reflected after running this command.

you should be able to do

$docker-compose up -d --no-deps --build <service_name>

The --no-deps will not start linked services.

Use the --build flag to the up command, along with the -d flag to run your containers in the background:

docker-compose up -d --build

This will rebuild all images defined in your compose file, then restart any containers whose images have changed.

-d assumes that you don't want to keep everything running in your shell foreground. This makes it act more like restart, but it's not required.

The problem is that restart will restart your current containers, which is not what you want.

As an example, I just did this

• change the docker file for one of the images
• call docker-compose build to build the images
• call docker-compose down¹ and docker-compose up
  • docker-compose restart will NOT work here
  • using docker-compose start instead also does not work

To be honest, i'm not completly sure you need to do a down first, but that should be easy to check.¹ The bottomline is that you need to call up. You will see the containers of unchanged images restarting, but for the changed image you'll see recreating.

The advantage of this over just calling up --build is that you can see the building-process first before you restart.

1: from the comments; down is not needed, you can just call up --build. Down has some "down"-sides, including possible being destructive to your (volume-)data.