Docker: Remove All Images and Containers

By  on  
Docker

I've moved to a new project at Mozilla which uses a much different stack than I'm used to; suddenly I'm thrust into a world of Mercurial, Docker, and a few other technologies I'm not accustomed to.  You know what that leads to:  foul language, frustration, booze, and...lots of starting over.  Some hate starting over but wiping the slate clean provides me a bit of ease, knowing that I'm not compounding the problem by trying to patch a fix of a shim.

Starting over in this case means wiping clean my Docker images and containers, just to make sure there are no conflicts or duplicates.  The following commands delete all containers and images:

# Delete every Docker containers
# Must be run first because images are attached to containers
docker rm -f $(docker ps -a -q)

# Delete every Docker image
docker rmi -f $(docker images -q)

Of course you don't want to do this if you're using Docker across multiple projects -- you'll find yourself in a world of hurt if you break your other images and containers.

There you have it -- a clean Docker slate in one pass!

Recent Features

  • By
    Vibration API

    Many of the new APIs provided to us by browser vendors are more targeted toward the mobile user than the desktop user.  One of those simple APIs the Vibration API.  The Vibration API allows developers to direct the device, using JavaScript, to vibrate in...

  • By
    How to Create a Twitter Card

    One of my favorite social APIs was the Open Graph API adopted by Facebook.  Adding just a few META tags to each page allowed links to my article to be styled and presented the way I wanted them to, giving me a bit of control...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    CSS Vertical Center with Flexbox

    I'm 31 years old and feel like I've been in the web development game for centuries.  We knew forever that layouts in CSS were a nightmare and we all considered flexbox our savior.  Whether it turns out that way remains to be seen but flexbox does easily...

  • By
    Reverse Element Order with CSS Flexbox

    CSS is becoming more and more powerful these days, almost to the point where the order of HTML elements output to the page no longer matters from a display standpoint -- CSS lets you do so much that almost any layout, large or small, is possible.  Semantics...

Discussion

  1. Raul Leite

    -f to brute force and resolve any conflicts between images and containers:

    docker rmi -f $ (docker images -q)
    
    docker rm -f $ (ps docker -q -a)
    
  2. #Stop all dockers

    docker stop $(ps docker -q -a)
    
  3. Ivan

    Force delete everything with attached volumes:

    docker rm -vf $(docker ps -aq)
    • Vish

      This doesn’t work.

  4. There is also new docker command, that will delete all unused images and volumes. It is less brute force and is usually save enough to put in cron on dev machine.

    docker system prune --all

    https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/system_prune/

  5. Umesh

    How to remove all docker images in Windows 10?

  6. There is also new docker command, that will delete all unused images and volumes. It is less brute force and is usually save enough to put in cron on dev machine.

    docker system prune --all
    

    https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/system_prune/

  7. Vish

    Perhaps you should have added how to remove all volumes too.

  8. There is also new docker command, that will delete all unused images and volumes. It is less brute force and is usually save enough to put in cron on dev machine. Ok!

  9. pavnesh yadav

    try this command

    docker system prune --all

    – all stopped containers
    – all networks not used by at least one container
    – all images without at least one container associated to them
    – all build cache

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!