The answer to this question seems to have changed with new versions of docker-compose. There is a label "com.docker.compose.project.working_dir": "/var/opt/docker", that points to the directory where I started docker-compose. I have not checked if that is pwd or the actual location of the docker-compose.yml file.

This got me interesting information about docker-compose:

samuel@vmhost1:~$ docker inspect fc440a1afbaa | grep com.docker.compose
                "com.docker.compose.config-hash": "89069285a4783b79b421ea84f2b652becbdee148fbad095a6d9d85aab67ececc",
                "com.docker.compose.container-number": "1",
                "com.docker.compose.oneoff": "False",
                "com.docker.compose.project": "docker",
                "com.docker.compose.project.config_files": "docker-compose.yml",
                "com.docker.compose.project.working_dir": "/var/opt/docker",
                "com.docker.compose.service": "jenkins",
                "com.docker.compose.version": "1.25.0"
samuel@vmhost1:~$ 

I'm running docker-compose.yml configuration version 3.6

It is not currently possible.

As an alternative might find the following helpful:

• Use docker ps -a | grep <certain_container>
• Use locate docker-compose.yml and find the one that you want
• Use docker-compose restart (do docker-compose to see option)

Update: Since this was asked, docker compose v2 was released, which is written in Go and accessible from docker compose instead of docker-compose (there may also be a shim directing docker-compose to this new version depending on your install). This version now embeds the directory into the image labels that you can retrieve with:

docker container inspect ${container_name_or_id} \
  --format '{{ index .Config.Labels "com.docker.compose.project.working_dir" }}'

This isn't perfect for the OP's request since there may be more than one compose file, the file could be located in a different directory from where compose was run, and it doesn't capture things like environment variables or profiles that may modify how compose starts the project. However I suspect it gets most people close enough to find the source.

If you're using an older version of compose, you can use one of the options in the original answer below:

As far as I can see, docker inspect CONTAINER_NAME does not provide this information, nor does docker-compose provide a method to get compose-related information from a running container.

From an already running container that you do not control, the information is not there. You can infer the location using bind mount directories if the container creates any host mounts to relative directories. Otherwise, it's possible to deploy containers without compose, and it's possible to use compose without a compose file on the filesystem (piped via stdin), and compose does not store these details on running containers for you.

What I'd like to do in a script:

• list certain running containers on a docker host
• get the corresponding docker-compose.yml file locations
• use docker-compose to restart all containers of the corresponding docker-compose projects at once

If you just want to run a restart on all containers in the same project, you don't need the first two steps, or even docker-compose. Instead, you can run:

docker ps --filter "label=com.docker.compose.project=${your_compose_project}" -q \
| xargs docker restart

Which uses a label docker-compose adds to each project it deploys.

If you want to proactively store the compose file location for later use, you can inject that as a label in your compose file:

version: '2'
services:
  test:
    image: busybox
    command: tail -f /dev/null
    labels:
      COMPOSE_PATH: ${PWD} # many Linux shells define the PWD variable

If your shell does not set a ${PWD} environment variable, you can start compose with:

PWD=$(pwd) docker-compose up -d

Then you can later inspect containers for this label's value with:

docker inspect --format '{{.Config.Labels.COMPOSE_PATH}}' ${your_container_id}

And you can chain a filter and inspect command together to find the path for a specific project:

docker ps --filter "label=com.docker.compose.project=${your_compose_project}" -q \
| xargs docker inspect --format '{{.Config.Labels.COMPOSE_PATH}}'