Incus: How to completely start over?

backpackers · August 9, 2026, 5:58pm

I ran incus admin init. Now, I’d like to remove all trace of Incus on my system and init again with different options.

Simply running init again doesn’t work, since I get errors like this:

The requested storage pool “default” already exists. Please choose another name.

I want to wipe everything and get back to a clean slate. Is there a documented way to do this?

stgraber · August 9, 2026, 11:02pm

There is a script which tries to do that for you. It should work for pretty simple environments.

github.com/lxc/incus

scripts/empty-incus.sh

main

#!/bin/sh -eu
if ! command -v jq >/dev/null 2>&1; then
    echo "This tool requires: jq"
    exit 1
fi

## Delete anything that's tied to a project
for project in $(incus query "/1.0/projects?recursion=1" | jq .[].name -r); do
    echo "==> Deleting all instances for project: ${project}"
    for instance in $(incus query "/1.0/instances?recursion=1&project=${project}" | jq .[].name -r); do
        incus delete --project "${project}" -f "${instance}"
    done

    echo "==> Deleting all images for project: ${project}"
    for image in $(incus query "/1.0/images?recursion=1&project=${project}" | jq .[].fingerprint -r); do
        incus image delete --project "${project}" "${image}"
    done
done

for project in $(incus query "/1.0/projects?recursion=1" | jq .[].name -r); do

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backpackers · August 11, 2026, 3:36pm

That’s perfect, thanks! Maybe it should be linked from the admin init docs btw, that’s where I was looking for it