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
    Page Visibility API

    One event that's always been lacking within the document is a signal for when the user is looking at a given tab, or another tab. When does the user switch off our site to look at something else? When do they come back?

  • By
    I’m an Impostor

    This is the hardest thing I've ever had to write, much less admit to myself.  I've written resignation letters from jobs I've loved, I've ended relationships, I've failed at a host of tasks, and let myself down in my life.  All of those feelings were very...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Animated Progress Bars Using MooTools: dwProgressBar

    I love progress bars. It's important that I know roughly what percentage of a task is complete. I've created a highly customizable MooTools progress bar class that animates to the desired percentage. The Moo-Generated XHTML This DIV structure is extremely simple and can be controlled...

  • By
    Check All/None Checkboxes Using MooTools

    There's nothing worse than having to click every checkbox in a list. Why not allow users to click one item and every checkbox becomes checked? Here's how to do just that with MooTools 1.2. The XHTML Note the image with the ucuc ID -- that...

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!