Skip to content
MultiDocker

Starting, Stopping & Restarting

Once a project is registered, these verbs control its lifecycle.

Start a project

Section titled “Start a project”
mdocker up
mdocker up aurora

up runs the port-conflict pre-flight, renders the COMPOSE_FILE chain and starts the containers, attaching them to the edge network.

Port pre-flight flags

Section titled “Port pre-flight flags”
Flag Effect
--auto-remap-ports Remap a conflicting host port to a free one automatically, without prompting.
--no-port-check Skip the pre-flight entirely.

If the pre-flight cannot find a free replacement port, up exits with code 2 (see Exit Codes).

Stop a project

Section titled “Stop a project”
mdocker down
mdocker down aurora

down stops the containers but preserves the generated override, so a later up brings the project back exactly as configured. Stopping a project also stops any public tunnels it has open.

restart vs. cycle

Section titled “restart vs. cycle”

These two look similar but do very different things.

restart — quick bounce

Section titled “restart — quick bounce”
mdocker restart
mdocker restart aurora

restart is a plain docker compose restart. It does not re-render the override and does not re-attach containers to a recreated edge network. Use it for a quick bounce when nothing about the environment changed.

cycle — robust full restart

Section titled “cycle — robust full restart”
mdocker cycle
mdocker cycle          # the running projects
mdocker cycle --all    # every registered project

cycle is the recovery tool after a runtime update or a recreated edge network. It stops the running projects, does edge down + edge up, then brings the previously-running projects back with up … --auto-remap-ports (recreating them). It continues past per-step failures and returns a non-zero exit code if anything failed.

Section titled “Related”
MultiDocker · Coding9 GmbH