Why I’m working on Windows

I normally develop on a Linux workstation, however I am in the middle of a move. I’ve got my servers in my homelab powered down as I am working on preparing the server rack for relocation starting by unplugging all the wires. This morning as I was in the middle of creating another SaaS prototype, I found myself seeing an error message I see all too often.

The Docker Error

Error response from daemon: driver failed programming external connectivity on endpoint postgres-1 (cfeb6c3cc7cc76e13a36236852fc3593d789a95f2fa6f449baa4a839e5b49160): Bind for 0.0.0.0:5432 failed: port is already allocated

The above error tells me that I have port 5432, the port for PostgreSQL already allocated.

Cleaning Up Containers in Docker Desktop Didn’t Work

I’m not that familiar with running a development environment in Windows, so I pulled up Docker Desktop and I attempted to remove the containers manually through the GUI. To my surprise none of my containers would remove and as such I couldn’t remove any associated volumes. I pull up cmd

unknown shorthand flag: 'a' in -a
See 'docker stop --help'.

How to Stop and Remove All Docker Containers in Powershell

I remind myself that I haven’t yet had coffee and that I am working on a Windows Machine. I pull up PowerShell and I give it a think for a moment. I tell myself it’s been a while since you have done a PS script, what’s the command equivalent to $ in PS… oh, ya… it’s ForEach after I Googled to confirm that indeed is a command in PS and I also found the ForEach-Object command as well. After reading a bit about the differences I chose to use ForEach-Object because it’s designed to work seamlessly with a pipeline, while being more memory efficient because it’s stream the input object-by-object. In contrast, foreach loads the entire collection into memory.

I remind myself that I need to put on a pot of coffee and give way to the urge to do it now. After returning to my desk I settle on the following commands:

docker ps -a -q | ForEach-Object { docker stop $_ }
docker ps -a -q | ForEach-Object { docker rm $_ }

Explaining What These Commands Do

Let’s break down the command to understand the utility here:

docker ps -a

List all containers, including those that are stopped

-q

Gives you just the container IDs and suppresses the rest of the info from docker ps, i.e. quiet mode.

| ForEach-Object { docker stop $_ }

The above command pipes each resulting object from the prior command into the docker stop command. Where ForEach-Object is a small optimization over ForEach for the reasons cited above. Now running the second command all the containers are stopped and the images have been removed and I can now remove the volumes. As I clean my workspace up and I get ready to build my new SaaS project using .docker-compose up --build -d, I hear my son waking up. It’s time to greet my son “Good morning”, before starting my regular job.

Summary

I hope that this series of thoughts is helpful to Dev on Windows machine, I’ll be back with another article soon with a list of my favorite docker commands.