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How to Reinstall a Vultr Cloud Compute Instance

Updated on 11 September, 2025

Learn how to reinstall the operating system on your Vultr Cloud Compute instance while preserving your IP address and hostname.

Reinstalling an instance wipes the file system, resets all configurations, and reinstalls the operating system. Any data on the instance's file system is permanently deleted and cannot be recovered unless a backup or snapshot is available in your Vultr account.

Follow this guide to reinstall a Vultr Cloud Compute instance using the Vultr Customer Portal, API, CLI, or Terraform.

Warning
Reinstalling an instance will wipe all data and reinstall the operating system.
  • Vultr Customer Portal
  • Vultr API
  • Vultr CLI
  • Terraform
  1. Navigate to Products and click Compute.
  2. Click your target Vultr Cloud Compute instance to open its management page.
  3. Click Server Reinstall on the top-right navigation menu.
  4. Check the confirmation prompt and click Reinstall Server to apply the changes.

  1. Send a GET request to the List Instances endpoint and note your target instance's ID.

    console 
    $ curl "https://api.vultr.com/v2/instances" \
  -X GET \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ${VULTR_API_KEY}"

  2. Send a POST request to the Reinstall Instance endpoint to reinstall the target instance.

    console 
    $ curl "https://api.vultr.com/v2/instances/{instance-id}/reinstall" \
  -X POST \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ${VULTR_API_KEY}" \

  1. List all available instances and note your target instance's ID.

    console 
    $ vultr-cli instance list

  2. Reinstall the target instance.

    console 
    $ vultr-cli instance reinstall <instance_id>

  1. Open your Terraform configuration for the existing Cloud Compute instance.

  2. Trigger a reinstall by replacing the instance during apply.

    console 
    $ terraform apply -replace=vultr_instance.cc

  3. Apply the configuration and observe the following output:

    Apply complete! Resources: 1 added, 0 changed, 1 destroyed.

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