When you use the docker kill command, by default it immediately stops/kills the container (without giving it an opportunity to shutdown gracefully). It does so by sending the SIGKILL signal to the main process inside the container. However, you can send a different signal (instead of SIGKILL) using the --signal flag. For example, to send a SIGINT signal (which is equivalent to doing Ctrl + C inside of terminal), you can do the following:
docker kill --signal=SIGINT container_name
Please note that docker kill <container_name> command is synonymous to the new docker container kill <container_name> command. While both work, the latter/newer syntax was introduced to make the commands more verbose, so that the commands are more obvious in what they do.
This post was published by Daniyal Hamid. Daniyal currently works as the Head of Engineering in Germany and has 20+ years of experience in software engineering, design and marketing. Please show your love and support by sharing this post.