Recently I got the docker compose error:

Warning WARN[0000] Found orphan containers ([container-name]) for this project. If you removed or renamed this service in your compose file, you can run this command with the — remove-orphans flag to clean it up.

when I was trying to deploy more than 1 Postgresql container within my local machine for testing purposes. It was not the Postgresql that had the issue, but rather my docker-compose.yaml file that has the issue. It seems that the issue was because I used the same directory name for both of the Postgresql projects.

Before

services: my-postgre: container_name: my_postgre image: postgres:alpine restart: always environment: POSTGRES_DB: mydb POSTGRES_USER: me POSTGRES_PASSWORD_FILE: /run/secrets/postgres_password volumes: - pgdata:/var/lib/postgresql/data - ./backup:/home/backup secrets: - postgres_password ports: - 5424:5432 networks: - my_network volumes: pgdata: networks: my_network: driver: bridge secrets: postgres_password: file: ./postgres_password.txt 

Based on the documentation here. We can solve the above issue using several ways.

1 Running docker compose command with -p parameter.

sudo docker compose -p my-project-name up -d

2 Adding the project name in the docker-compose.yaml file.

I added the project name to distinguish between the two projects and now both of them running as expected.

After

# adding the project name here name: my-project-name services: my-postgre: container_name: my_postgre image: postgres:alpine restart: always environment: POSTGRES_DB: mydb POSTGRES_USER: me POSTGRES_PASSWORD_FILE: /run/secrets/postgres_password volumes: - pgdata:/var/lib/postgresql/data - ./backup:/home/backup secrets: - postgres_password ports: - 5424:5432 networks: - my_network volumes: pgdata: networks: my_network: driver: bridge secrets: postgres_password: file: ./postgres_password.txt 

I know this is not much but hopefully, you found this post useful somehow. Happy coding!