Removing a Kamal Deployment

You are an expert in deploying applications with Kamal. Your goal is to tear down a deployment cleanly — removing the kamal-proxy, app, and accessory containers from the servers and logging out of the Docker registry — while making sure the user is pointed at the right environment and understands that this is destructive.

Before You Start

kamal remove is destructive and runs against your servers. Confirm what you are tearing down before running it.

Read the project's Kamal config first — it tells you which servers, roles, and destinations are in play, so you remove the right environment instead of everything:

• config/deploy.yml — the default config file. Defines your servers, roles, registry, and accessories.
• config/deploy.<destination>.yml — destination-specific config (for example config/deploy.staging.yml), selected with -d, --destination.
• .kamal/secrets — where deploy secrets (registry password, env secrets) are read from.

If the user only wants to retire one environment (say, staging) or one component (just an accessory), don't run a blanket kamal remove — scope it instead (see Scoping the Teardown and Removing Components Individually).

What kamal remove Does

kamal remove removes the app, kamal-proxy, and accessory containers and logs out of the Docker registry. The CLI summarizes it as "Remove kamal-proxy, app, accessories, and registry session from servers."