# Uninstalling discourse instance
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/uninstalling-discourse-instance/128637
**Category:** Self-hosting
**Created:** [September 15, 2019, 6:39pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/uninstalling-discourse-instance/128637 "2019-09-15T18:39:27Z")
**Posts on this page:** 9
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Earlie](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Earlie)
#### Post date: [September 15, 2019, 6:39pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/uninstalling-discourse-instance/128637/1 "2019-09-15T18:39:27Z")
Helllo,
Is there comprehensive documentation available on how to uninstall discourse instance via command line?
This is required to do a clean install once again.
---
### Author:  [@fzngagan](https://meta.discourse.org/u/fzngagan)
#### Post date: [September 15, 2019, 6:41pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/uninstalling-discourse-instance/128637/2 "2019-09-15T18:41:46Z")
According to the official installation guide, discourse lives inside its own docker container.
So, you simply need to stop the container and remove `/var/discourse` folder.
## Steps.
1. ssh into your vps server.
2. `cd /var/discourse`
3. `./launcher stop app`
4. `./launcher destroy app`
5. `cd /var`
6. `sudo rm -rf discourse`
---
### Author:  [@VinodSingh](https://meta.discourse.org/u/VinodSingh)
#### Post date: [May 10, 2022, 6:58pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/uninstalling-discourse-instance/128637/8 "2022-05-10T18:58:37Z")
It would be nice to include **Uninstall** section in installation or some other guide.
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### Author:  [@pfaffman](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pfaffman)
#### Post date: [May 10, 2022, 7:12pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/uninstalling-discourse-instance/128637/9 "2022-05-10T19:12:37Z")
Since the recommended way to do things is to install Discourse on a fresh installation used for nothing else, the way most people uninstall is by destroying the virtual machine.
Those instructions are by design for only the one most standard case.
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### Author:  [@merefield](https://meta.discourse.org/u/merefield)
#### Post date: [May 10, 2022, 7:25pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/uninstalling-discourse-instance/128637/10 "2022-05-10T19:25:08Z")
Absolutely, โUninstallโ [is so year 2000](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMware_ESXi) ๐
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### Author:  [@ThrashAbaddon](https://meta.discourse.org/u/ThrashAbaddon)
#### Post date: [September 15, 2022, 12:39pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/uninstalling-discourse-instance/128637/11 "2022-09-15T12:39:41Z")
One interesting thing, if I want to stop and destroy the app it will try to download another base image. What the hell? ๐
```plaintext
:/var/discourse> sudo ./launcher stop app
x86_64 arch detected.
WARNING: We are about to start downloading the Discourse base image
This process may take anywhere between a few minutes to an hour, depending on your network speed
Please be patient
2.0.20220818-0047: Pulling from discourse/base
Digest: sha256:7734701087766821ffb2ddcef423754798bd345c2ac0d550131c6e6905c268e8
Status: Downloaded newer image for discourse/base:2.0.20220818-0047
docker.io/discourse/base:2.0.20220818-0047
You have less than 5GB of free space on the disk where /var/lib/docker is located. You will need more space to continue
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vg00-var 9.8G 4.9G 4.4G 53% /var
Would you like to attempt to recover space by cleaning docker images and containers in the system? (y/N)y
If the cleanup was successful, you may try again now
```
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### Author:  [@ThrashAbaddon](https://meta.discourse.org/u/ThrashAbaddon)
#### Post date: [September 15, 2022, 12:50pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/uninstalling-discourse-instance/128637/12 "2022-09-15T12:50:09Z")
What I did was:
1. `sudo rm -rf discourse`
2. find the docker container that has discourse, kill it and then remove it.
Let me know if I need to do anything else. ๐
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### Author:  [@pfaffman](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pfaffman)
#### Post date: [September 15, 2022, 12:58pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/uninstalling-discourse-instance/128637/13 "2022-09-15T12:58:40Z")
> [@ThrashAbaddon](#):
>
> if I want to stop and destroy the app it will try to download another base image. What the hell? ๐
Yeah. `./launcher` keeps itself and the Discourse base image up to date. If youโre familiar with docker then you can just `docker stop app;docker rm app` as you did.
---
### Author:  [@system](https://meta.discourse.org/u/system)
#### Post date: [October 15, 2022, 12:59pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/uninstalling-discourse-instance/128637/14 "2022-10-15T12:59:12Z")
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