podman-system-reset(1)

💖 podman-system-reset — reset storage back to initial state 💖

okay bestie, welcome to podman-system-reset(1), a page from the General Commands Manual ✨ this is the big red button. the nuclear option. the "we're starting over" moment. let's get into it 🫶

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

podman system reset [options]

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

okay so podman system reset removes all pods, containers, images, networks and volumes, and machines. all of it. gone. it also removes the configured graphRoot and runRoot directories.

💀 bestie PLEASE make sure those aren't set to some important directory. like, actually check. we are not joking around here.

this command must be run before changing any of the following fields in the containers.conf or storage.conf files: driver, static_dir, tmp_dir or volume_path.

here's the thing though — podman system reset reads the current configuration and attempts to remove all of the relevant configurations. so if the administrator modified the configuration files first? yeah, podman system reset might not be able to clean up the previous storage. order of operations matters, iykyk 😭

also, and this is important: podman system reset does not restart podman.service and podman.socket systemd units. you may need to manually restart it after running this command. no cap.

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

• --force, -f — do not prompt for confirmation. it just goes 💅
• --help, -h — print usage statement 📖

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🎀 EXAMPLES 🎀

reset all storage back to a clean initialized state

$ podman system reset
WARNING! This will remove:
        - all containers
        - all pods
        - all images
        - all networks
        - all build cache
        - all machines
        - all volumes
        - the graphRoot directory: /var/lib/containers/storage
        - the runRoot directory: /run/containers/storage
Are you sure you want to continue? [y/N] y

look at that list. the whole inventory. it's giving apocalypse 🌈 but it's fine, it's fine, you said y yourself.

force reset all storage back to a clean initialized state

$ podman system reset --force

no questions, no confirmation, just vibes and deletion 🔥

switching rootless user from VFS driver to overlay with fuse-overlayfs

okay this one's a whole situation, so let's break it down 🧚

if the user ran rootless containers without having the fuse-overlayfs program installed, podman defaults to the vfs storage in their home directory. so you're on vfs, not by choice, just by circumstance. tragic.

if they want to switch to use fuse-overlay, they must install the fuse-overlayfs package. 📦

the user needs to reset the storage to use overlayfs by default. so — execute podman system reset as the user first, to remove the VFS storage. 🗑️

now the user can edit the /etc/containers/storage.conf to make any changes if necessary. ✏️

if the system's default was already overlay, then no changes are necessary to switch to fuse-overlayfs. slay, nothing to do 💅

podman looks for the existence of fuse-overlayfs to use it when set in the overlay driver, only falling back to vfs if the program does not exist. so like, it checks first. 👀

users can run podman info to ensure podman is using fuse-overlayfs and the overlay driver. go verify, bestie, you deserve the confirmation ✨

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🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

• podman(1)
• podman-system(1)
• fuse-overlayfs(1)
• containers-storage.conf(5)

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👑 HISTORY 👑

November 2019, originally compiled by Dan Walsh (dwalsh at redhat dot com) 💜

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and that's the whole page, babe 🫶 it's podman-system-reset(1) from the General Commands Manual, and that little footer tag right at the bottom is just the page name itself — podman-system-reset(1) — doing its thing. go forth, reset responsibly, and always check your graphRoot first 😭🌸✨