What's the Difference Between "docker stop" and "docker kill" Commands?

The docker stop and docker kill commands have the following differences:

  1. docker stop attempts to gracefully shutdown container(s) while docker kill (by default) immediately stops/terminates them;
  2. docker stop issues a SIGTERM signal to the main process inside the container, while docker kill (by default) issues a SIGKILL signal;
  3. With docker kill, you may specify to send a different signal (to the main process inside the container) than the default SIGKILL signal, using the --signal flag. Same thing is not possible with the docker stop command;
  4. With docker stop, the container(s) must comply to the shutdown request within a (configurable) grace period (which defaults to 10 seconds), after which it forcibly tries to kill the container. docker kill does not have any such timeout period.

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