Docker: Where is "reset to factory defaults" on linux?

Question

I've used Docker on Windows and macOS for the past couple years. Often, when things got really messed up, I found it faster to use the Reset to factory defaults option in the Docker GUI to do a clean reset than to troubleshoot whatever problem was giving me grief.

Now I'm using Ubuntu 20.04 and I can't find this option. I found a long list of commands to remove/reset individual components but where is the single command for this like Windows/macOS?

Answer 1

Use your OS's package manager to uninstall the Docker package; then

sudo rm -rf /var/lib/docker

That should completely undo all Docker-related things.

Note that the "Desktop" applications have many more settings (VM disk/memory size, embedded Kubernetes, ...). The native-Linux Docker installations tend to have very few, and generally the only way to set them is by directly editing the JSON configuration file in /etc. So "reset Docker" doesn't really tend to be an issue on native Linux.

As always, make sure you have an external copy of your images (in Docker Hub or a registry like ECR) or you can rebuild them from Dockerfiles, your containers are designed to tolerate being deleted and recreated, and if you use named volumes, you have backups of those.