Remove Caprover, docker swarm and related artifacts from your linux machine

Published On: Oct 25, 2020

Getting rid of Caprover and all related artifacts from your server might be tricky. This post is a quick note on how to uninstall and remove all related artifacts.

In my effort to learn CI & CD and after failing badly to install Dokku on my raspberry-pi (they don’t provide precompiled binaries yet and I am not an expert in compiling linux binaries, do did not every think about that), I discovered Caprover. Its a nice little PAAS ecosystem that builds upon Docker and provides a handy dashboard (and cli tools as well if you prefer terminal) to configure, customize the application and related setups. You can explore it further at the official link: https://caprover.com/.

So the story is after configuring a few apps (read as docker images) I realized, my raspberry-pi is struggling. So tried removing Caprover and all its Docker images from the Pi which was not a nice experience. Their docs has no references on how to uninstall it. I agree its all about Docker and Docker images but still, a section on this would have saved me 4 hours of wild hunting on the Internet.

I have, however, installed it on my Linode VPS and am happy with the setup.

First delete all containers including its volumes:
```
docker rm -vf $(docker ps -a -q)
```
Then delete all the images
```
docker rmi -f $(docker images -a -q)
```
Next remove all the docker services, exit swarm and prune the system. Also remove /captain from the filesystem.
```
docker service rm $(docker service ls -q)
docker swarm leave --force
docker system prune -a
rm -rf /captain
```

This post is based on below thread from the caprover github issues thread.