Automatically restart a container

Autorestart is a service-level setting that will automatically start your containers whenever they stop or crash. It has the following options:

OFF: if the container stops, regardless of the exit code, it won’t be autorestarted and will stay in Stopped state.
ON_FAILURE: if the container stops with an exit code different from 0, it will be autorestarted.
ALWAYS: if the container stops, regardless of the exit code, it will be autorestarted.

Please note that Autorestart is incompatible with Autodestroy in the following scenario:

If Autorestart is set to ALWAYS, Autodestroy has to be OFF

The Autorestart feature is implemented using Docker’s --autorestart flag, so the Docker daemon will try to restart the container indefinitely until it succeeds using an incremental back-off algorithm.

If the Docker daemon in the node is restarted (because it has been upgraded, or because the underlying node has been restarted), only containers launched within a service with Autorestart set to ALWAYS will be started automatically.

Launching a Service with Autorestart

Using the API

You can specify the Autorestart option when launching a service through the API:

POST /api/app/v1/service/ HTTP/1.1
{
	"autorestart": "ON_FAILURE",
	[...]
}

If not provided, it will have a default value of OFF. Check our API documentation for more information.

Using the CLI

You can specify the Autorestart option when launching a service using the CLI:

$ docker-cloud service run --autorestart ON_FAILURE [...]

If not provided, it will have a default value of OFF. Check our API documentation for more information.

Using the web interface

At the moment, activating the Autorestart setting on the Service configuration step of the Launch new service wizard sets the autorestart settings to ALWAYS.

The default value is to be *deactivated* which will set the option to OFF.

Activating Crash Recovery to an already deployed service

Using the API

You can set the Autorestart option after the service has been deployed through the API:

PATCH /api/app/v1/service/(uuid)/ HTTP/1.1
{
	"autorestart": "ALWAYS",
}

Check our API documentation for more information.

Using the CLI

You can set the Autorestart option after the application has been deployed using the CLI:

$ docker-cloud service set --autorestart ALWAYS (name or uuid)

Check our API documentation for more information.

Using the web interface

You can also activate or deactivate Autorestart to a service after it has been deployed editing the service.