Docker will autostart any container with a RestartPolicy of ‘always’ when the docker service initially starts.

I’ve mostly had this situation occur when a container was created with –restart always, and the situation later changed such that I no longer wanted this to happen.

You won’t find any evidence of this within cron or any other normal system startup scripts; you’ll have to dig into the container configuration to find it.

In order to quickly find the RestartPolicy config, you can use

docker inspect my-container | grep -A 3 RestartPolicy

The -A n grep option shows n lines after the match.

To update the RestartPolicy config you can use

docker update --restart=no my-container

Here is a sample from one of my containers.

docker inspect c2ea02bc1349 | grep -A 3 RestartPolicy
"RestartPolicy": {
"Name": "always",
"MaximumRetryCount": 0
},

docker update --restart=no c2ea02bc1349

docker inspect c2ea02bc1349 | grep -A 3 RestartPolicy
"RestartPolicy": {
"Name": "no",
"MaximumRetryCount": 0
},