How to delete all Docker containers using a single Command

There may be a many containers either running or exited in your development machine. You need to clean them up in a regular basis.

To see the list of docker container running locally,

docker ps

But it does not show the excited containers. To see them all use -a

docker ps -a

Finally to delete you need to pass either the id or the name of each container. Wouldn't it be nice to delete them in a loop (its the concept here but we are not using it)? YES indeed it would be. To get only the ids of all the containers we can use -q switch.

So to get the list of only ids for all the containers we can use,

docker ps -a -q 

or

docker ps -aq

To delete we use

docker rm container_id

If we want to loop (again not actual loop but a concept) through all

docker rm $(docker ps -aq)

That's it - your magic command to delete all the running and exited containers in your machine.

This works in Linux (not in Windows).