DOCKER, TIL

TIL - Removing dead docker containers

Encountered this issue that there were some dead containers:

docker ps -af status=dead

Removing them with docker rm did nothing:

docker rm -f <container-id>

Did nothing, the containers will pop up once again when running docker ps.

They had to be removed from the file system with:

rm -rf /var/lib/docker/containers/<container-id>

And then restart the docker daemon with:

systemctl restart docker

Some notes:

  • Dont know at what point the containers die.
  • The dead containers once belonged to a docker service.
  • As part of their lifecicle, these services are stoped, restarted and removed.
  • Dead containers did not belong to any existing service.
  • No processes seemed to use the dead containers.