Kurtosis clean

Clean up Kurtosis enclaves and artifacts. Remove stopped enclaves, running enclaves with -a flag, and stopped engine containers. Use when you need to free up resources or start fresh.

install

source · Clone the upstream repo

git clone https://github.com/kurtosis-tech/kurtosis

Claude Code · Install into ~/.claude/skills/

T=$(mktemp -d) && git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/kurtosis-tech/kurtosis "$T" && mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && cp -r "$T/skills/clean" ~/.claude/skills/kurtosis-tech-kurtosis-clean && rm -rf "$T"

manifest: skills/clean/SKILL.md

Clean

Remove Kurtosis enclaves and leftover artifacts.

Basic clean

Removes only stopped enclaves and stopped engine containers:

kurtosis clean

Clean everything

Removes all enclaves (including running ones):

kurtosis clean -a

Selective removal

To remove a specific enclave without touching others:

# Stop an enclave
kurtosis enclave stop <enclave-name>

# Remove a specific enclave
kurtosis enclave rm <enclave-name>

When clean hangs

On Kubernetes,

kurtosis clean -a

can hang if the logs collector cleanup tries to create pods on tainted/unhealthy nodes. See the

k8s-clean-cluster

skill for manual cleanup steps.

On Docker, if clean hangs:

# Kill the hanging process
pkill -f "kurtosis clean"

# Manually remove containers
docker ps -a | grep kurtosis | awk '{print $1}' | xargs -r docker rm -f

# Remove networks
docker network ls | grep kurtosis | awk '{print $1}' | xargs -r docker network rm

# Restart engine
kurtosis engine start