podman-system-reset(1) General Commands Manual podman-system-reset(1)
NAME
podman-system-reset - Reset storage back to initial state
SYNOPSIS
podman system reset [options]
DESCRIPTION
podman system reset removes all pods, containers, images, networks and
volumes, and machines. It also removes the configured graphRoot and
runRoot directories. Make sure these are not set to some important di-
rectory.
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.
podman system reset reads the current configuration and attempts to re-
move all of the relevant configurations. If the administrator modified
the configuration files first, podman system reset might not be able to
clean up the previous storage.
OPTIONS
--force, -f
Do not prompt for confirmation
--help, -h
Print usage statement
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
Switching rootless user from VFS driver to overlay with fuse-overlayfs
If the user ran rootless containers without having the fuse-overlayfs
program installed, podman defaults to the vfs storage in their home di-
rectory. 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. Execute podman system reset as the user first to
remove the VFS storage. Now the user can edit the /etc/containers/stor-
age.conf to make any changes if necessary. If the system's default was
already overlay, then no changes are necessary to switch to fuse-over-
layfs. 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. Users can run podman info to ensure Podman is using fuse-
overlayfs and the overlay driver.
SEE ALSO
podman(1), podman-system(1), fuse-overlayfs(1), containers-stor-
age.conf(5)
HISTORY
November 2019, Originally compiled by Dan Walsh (dwalsh at redhat dot
com)
podman-system-reset(1)
Generated by dwww version 1.16 on Tue Dec 16 06:04:36 CET 2025.