The container name "/postgres" is already in use by container "*"

What happened?

When I tried to create and run a new project with docker-compose I got these errors:

ERROR: for postgres  Cannot create container for service postgres: Conflict. The container name "/postgres" is already in use by container "...". You have to remove (or rename) that container to be able to reuse that name.

ERROR: for docs  Cannot create container for service docs: Conflict. The container name "/docs" is already in use by container "...". You have to remove (or rename) that container to be able to reuse that name.

ERROR: for postgres  Cannot create container for service postgres: Conflict. The container name "/postgres" is already in use by container "...". You have to remove (or rename) that container to be able to reuse that name.
ERROR: Encountered errors while bringing up the project.

What should’ve happened instead?

Should run the new project without any problem. When I renamed the containers they worked. We could add the project slug name to container_name.

Additional details

I created a new project with docker support, then:

docker-compose -f local.yml build

Finally:

docker-compose -f local.yml up

Logs:

$ docker-compose -f local.yml up
Creating network “test_api_default” with the default driver
Creating volume “test_api_local_postgres_data” with default driver
Creating volume “test_api_local_postgres_data_backups” with default driver
Creating postgres …
Creating docs     … error
Creating postgres … error
ontainer to be able to reuse that name.
ERROR: for postgres  Cannot create container for service postgres: Conflict. The container name “/postgres” is already in use by container “*”. You have to remove (or rename) that container to be able to reuse that name.
ERROR: for docs  Cannot create container for service docs: Conflict. The container name “/docs” is already in use by container “*”. You have to remove (or rename) that container to be able to reuse that name.
ERROR: for postgres  Cannot create container for service postgres: Conflict. The container name “/postgres” is already in use by container “*”. You have to remove (or rename) that container to be able to reuse that name.
ERROR: Encountered errors while bringing up the project.

[MartinSchmidt123]

When you remove the container name definition for the docker-compose services, the current folders name is used as prefix for the container name. By default this is the project slug. Removing the container names would also allow to pass the --project-name option to docker-compose to setup several environments (due to port collisions only one can run at a time though).

My preferred way would be to remove the container_name definitions from the docker-compose files and add the --project-name={{project_slug}} option in the documentation.

[abaart]

I noticed that it seems that container names are set properly in the production.yml file. I solved this error by adding <project_name>_local_ in front of all container_name fields in local.yml. Like is done in production.yml.

This would seem to be a reasonable ‘fix’ in my opinion.