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
    fetch API

    One of the worst kept secrets about AJAX on the web is that the underlying API for it, XMLHttpRequest, wasn't really made for what we've been using it for.  We've done well to create elegant APIs around XHR but we know we can do better.  Our effort to...

  • By
    How I Stopped WordPress Comment Spam

    I love almost every part of being a tech blogger:  learning, preaching, bantering, researching.  The one part about blogging that I absolutely loathe:  dealing with SPAM comments.  For the past two years, my blog has registered 8,000+ SPAM comments per day.  PER DAY.  Bloating my database...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Multiple Backgrounds with CSS

    Anyone that's been in the web development industry for 5+ years knows that there are certain features that we should have had several years ago. One of those features is the HTML5 placeholder; we used JavaScript shims for a decade before placeholder came...

  • By
    Smooth Scrolling with MooTools Fx.SmoothScroll

    I get quite a few support requests for my previous MooTools SmoothScroll article and the issue usually boils down to the fact that SmoothScroll has become Fx.SmoothScroll. Here's a simple usage of Fx.SmoothScroll. The HTML The only HTML requirement for Fx.SmoothScroll is that all named...

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!