How to stop multiple Docker Container at once

Docker containers can be stopped simply with the docker stop command. Of course, it is possible to append multiple container names or container IDs to the docker stop command to stop multiple containers at once. This is especially useful on test systems to quickly find a clean environment again.

Stop all running Container

Instead of manually listing the individual IDs or names of the desired containers, you can also cleverly combine the docker ps (which is the same like docker containers list) and the docker stop commands to stop all running Docker containers, for example:

docker ps --format {{.ID}} | xargs docker stop

The first command docker ps --format {{.ID}} gets a list of the current running Docker containers and only outputs the IDs of the running containers.

The second command xargs then gets the result of the first command via the pipe Operator |  and provides the IDs as an argument to the following docker stop command.

Stop only specific Container

By extending the first command with the --filter  (short -f) argument, you're able to reduce the result of docker ps. For example if you want to stop all container running which have mongodb in their name, you can run the following command:

docker ps -f "name=mongodb" --format {{.ID}} | xargs docker stop

If you just want to test your result-set before passing all results to docker stop you can just use docker ps -f "name=mongodb" until you're happy with the result set.

A full list of all possible commands and options of docker ps can be found in the Docker documentation. If you have any questions feel free to ask in the comments.