Docker error response from daemon: "Conflict ... already in use by container"

Question

It looks like a container with the name qgis-desktop-2-4 already exists in the system. You can check the output of the below command to confirm if it indeed exists:

$ docker ps -a

The last column in the above command's output is for names.

If the container exists, remove it using:

$ docker rm qgis-desktop-2-4

Or forcefully using,

$ docker rm -f qgis-desktop-2-4

And then try creating a new container.

Instead of command: docker run

You should use:

docker start **CONTAINER ID**

because the container is already exist

More info

I got this error quite a lot, so now I do a batch removal of all unused containers at once:

docker container prune 

add -f to force removal without prompt.

To list all unused containers (without removal):

docker container ls -a --filter status=exited --filter status=created 

See here more examples how to prune other objects (networks, volumes, etc.).

For people landing here from google like me and just want to build containers using multiple docker-compose files with one shared service:

Sometimes you have different projects that would share e.g. a database docker container. Only the first run should start the DB-Docker, the second should be detect that the DB is already running and skip this. To achieve such a behaviour we need the Dockers to lay in the same network and in the same project. Also the docker container name needs to be the same.

1st: Set the same network and container name in docker-compose

docker-compose in project 1:

version: '3'

services:
    service1:
        depends_on:
            - postgres
        # ...
        networks:
            - dockernet

    postgres:
        container_name: project_postgres
        image: postgres:10-alpine
        restart: always
        # ...
        networks:
            - dockernet

networks:
    dockernet:

docker-compose in project 2:

version: '3'

services:
    service2:
        depends_on:
            - postgres
        # ...
        networks:
            - dockernet

    postgres:
        container_name: project_postgres
        image: postgres:10-alpine
        restart: always
        # ...
        networks:
            - dockernet

networks:
    dockernet:

2nd: Set the same project using -p param or put both files in the same directory.

docker-compose -p {projectname} up