Docker - Cannot remove dead container

Question

I am unable to remove the dead container, it appears again after i restart the Docker service.

docker ps -a
CONTAINER ID         STATUS          
11667ef1623         


        

Answer 1

You can also remove dead containers with this command

docker rm $(docker ps --all -q -f status=dead)

But, I'm really not sure why & how the dead containers are created. This error seems related https://github.com/typesafehub/mesos-spark-integration-tests/issues/34 whenever i get dead containers

[Update] With Docker 1.13 update, we can easily remove both unwanted containers, dangling images

$ docker system df #will show used space, similar to the unix tool df
$ docker system prune # will remove all unused data.

Answer 2

The best way to get rid of dead container processes is to restart your docker service. I was unable to remove a container as it was stuck in restarting status, I just restarted the docker service and it worked for me.

Answer 3

There are a lot of answers in here but none of them involved the (quick) solution that worked for me.

I'm using Docker version 1.12.3, build 6b644ec.

I simply ran docker rmi <image-name> for the image from whence the dead container came. A docker ps -a then showed the dead container missing completely.

Then, of course, I just re-pulled the image and ran the container again.

I have no idea how it found itself in this state but so it is...

Answer 4

Tried all of the above (short of reboot/ restart docker).

So here is the error om docker rm:

$ docker rm 08d51aad0e74
Error response from daemon: driver "devicemapper" failed to remove root filesystem for 08d51aad0e74060f54bba36268386fe991eff74570e7ee29b7c4d74047d809aa: remove /var/lib/docker/devicemapper/mnt/670cdbd30a3627ae4801044d32a423284b540c5057002dd010186c69b6cc7eea: device or resource busy

Then I did a the following:

$  grep docker /proc/*/mountinfo | grep 958722d105f8586978361409c9d70aff17c0af3a1970cb3c2fb7908fe5a310ac
/proc/20416/mountinfo:629 574 253:15 / /var/lib/docker/devicemapper/mnt/958722d105f8586978361409c9d70aff17c0af3a1970cb3c2fb7908fe5a310ac rw,relatime shared:288 - xfs /dev/mapper/docker-253:5-786536-958722d105f8586978361409c9d70aff17c0af3a1970cb3c2fb7908fe5a310ac rw,nouuid,attr2,inode64,logbsize=64k,sunit=128,swidth=128,noquota

This got be the PID of the offending process keeping it busy - 20416 (the item after /proc/

So I did a ps -p and to my surprise find:

[devops@dp01app5030 SeGrid]$ ps -p 20416
  PID TTY          TIME CMD
20416 ?        00:00:19 ntpd

A true WTF moment. So I pair problem solved with Google and found this: Then found this https://github.com/docker/for-linux/issues/124

Turns out I had to restart ntp daemon and that fixed the issue!!!

Answer 5

Try this it worked for me on centos 1) docker container ls -a gives you a list of containers check status which you want to get rid of 2) docker container rm -f 97af2da41b2b not a big fan force flag but does the work to check it worked just fire the command again or list it. 3) continue till we clear all dead containers

Answer 6

Try this it worked for me:

docker rm -f <container_name>

eg. docker rm -f 11667ef16239