The following situation: I have a Spring Boot Application which runs in a Docker swarm but fails to start because it was not properly configured (a property is missing). It seems to me that the docker swarm always tries to restart the container, but always fails because of the missing property. The restart makes no sense because docker will never

Docker disable restart on-failure

The following situation:

I have a Spring Boot Application
which runs in a Docker swarm
but fails to start because it was not properly configured (a property is missing).
It seems to me that the docker swarm always tries to restart the container, but always fails because of the missing property.
The restart makes no sense because docker will never be able to start the application unless I fix the missing property.
So currently the swarm ends in an endless loop.

Regarding this problem I already read:

The docker documentation: https://docs.docker.com/config/containers/start-containers-automatically/
and several StackOverflow posts: https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=Docker+restart

My “setup”: The dockerfile:

ARG nexus_docker_registry=mynexus.com:10099
FROM ${nexus_docker_registry}/openjdk:8-jdk-alpine

ADD myjar.jar myjar.jar
ENV JAVA_OPTS=""
ENTRYPOINT [ "java", "-jar", "/myjar.jar" ]

my YML-file to create the docker service:

---
- hosts: docker_manager
  become: false

  vars:
    servicename: 'myservice'
    imageurl: "mynexus.com:10099/myjar:{{version}}"
    extraoptions:
      - "--with-registry-auth"
      - "--detach=true"
      - "--log-driver gelf"
      - "--log-opt 'gelf-address=udp://{{ groups['logstash'][0] }}:10001'"
      - "--hostname 'myhost.com'"
      - "--mount 'type=bind,source=/etc/localtime,destination=/etc/localtime:ro'"
      - "--mount 'type=volume,source=mykeys,destination=/mykeys'"
      - "--env 'spring.profiles.active=docker'"
      - "--publish 8000:6666"

  tasks:
    - name: Include vault
      include_vars: "myvault.yml"

    - name: "delete service '{{ servicename }}'"
      command: sudo docker service rm "{{ servicename }}"
      args:
        warn: false
      ignore_errors: true
      run_once: true

    - name: "create service {{ servicename }}"
      command: sudo docker service create {{ extraoptions | join( ' ' ) }} --name "{{ servicename }}" "{{ imageurl }}"
      args:
        warn: false
      run_once: true

What I want to achieve is:

If the spring boot application is not able to start because of for example a BeanCreationException or something similar, then I don’t want the docker service to restart endlessly.
If I restart the swarm etc. the docker service should restart automatically.

In the docker documentation is written:

If you manually stop a container, its restart policy is ignored until the Docker daemon restarts or the container is manually restarted. This is another attempt to prevent a restart loop.

So I guess that what I want to achieve is not possible with a restart policy.
Questions:

but maybe I can write something in my Dockerfile that I achieve my goals?
Or am I totally wrong here and misinterpret the documentation?

I am unfortunately not a docker expert and still learning to handle ‘the swarm’.

Answer

Because it does not seem possible what I wanted to achieve, I read the documentation again (https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/service_create/) and found the option --restart-max-attempts which will solve my problem with the endless loop.

Advertisement

Answer