How To Manually Remove A Container In Podman
Recently I kept getting this error:
podman run — rm — net=host — name=container container
error creating container storage: the container name “container” is already in use by “31d7724324lks3019908d896we22ece4f7db78162db4c8faab60725dbd4e1”. You have to remove that container to be able to reuse that name.: that name is already in use
I tried podman rm, then podman rmi, etc.
It used to work.
But some reason it didn’t anymore.
So what I did is remove it manually.
Here is how you do it:
cd /home/`whoami`/.local/share/containers/storage/vfs-containers/
Inside you will see the file: containers.json
Then make a backup in case you damage it.
cp containers.json containers.json.bck
Then find the JSON object ({…}) that contains the container UUID that you saw before.
e.g.: 31d7724324lks3019908d896we22ece4f7db78162db4c8faab60725
Then remove it.
In the same directory find the folder with the UUID of the container.
e.g.: 31d7724324lks3019908d896we22ece4f7db78162db4c8faab60725
Rename the directory.
mv 31d7724324lks3019908d896we22ece4f7db78162db4c8faab60725 31d7724324lks3019908d896we22ece4f7db78162db4c8faab60725_bck
Now, everything should work as usual.
If everything is functioning normally, you can delete the backups.
Good luck!