docker-compose down - network is external, skipping

Question

I'm trying bring down all services for an external network defined in my docker-compose file (using version 2).

When I try to do a docker-compose down, I get a message stating,

Network 'your_network' is external, skipping

Is there a way, using docker-compose, to stop and remove all the containers for a user-defined or external network?

Answer 1

I've encountered the same error. docker-compose can only stop the containers started by docker-compose. In my case: the containers that I wanted to stop were started by docker run. So I stopped the containers one by one. then started them with the docker-compose.yml

Not sure if you are the same case.

Answer 2

This isn't an error. You have a network declared as "external", mostly meaning that it may be used by other services or other docker-compose files. So when you stop those services, the network gets "skipped", because the network is shared among all services that reference it, and it would create an error to try to delete the external network.

Answer 3

Docker error messages (and in general) sucks as always.

Originally I had multiple services that used a custom network, as shown here:

version: '3'

networks:
  mynet:
    external: true

services:
  nexus-repository:
    image: sonatype/nexus3
    ports:
      - '8082:8081'
    networks:
      - mynet
    volumes:
      - '/nexus-data:/nexus-data'

To remove the containers I tried:

• sudo docker-compose down => NOPE
• ssudo docker network remove mynet => NOPE
• sudo docker-compose rm -sfv nexus-repository => NOPE

Nothing worked until I completely removed all references to the exernal network.

---

Solution

services:
  nexus-repository:
    image: sonatype/nexus3
    ports:
      - '8082:8081'
    volumes:
      - '/nexus-data:/nexus-data'

No more:

Network 'mynet' is external, skipping

And no more containers !

Answer 4

In my case, I had started my containers using a docker-compose file indeed yet through VSCode's remote container extension. If that's your case, you can stop your containers using VSCode's Docker extension (right click on your container group -> Docker Compose Down)