Software

Cleaning up Docker space

Docker accumulates state silently — stopped containers, dangling image layers, unattached volumes, orphaned networks. Four short commands, run in the right order, reclaim gigabytes safely without touching anything that's currently running or in use.

By Igor Moiseev · · 1 min read ·

Regularly clean your dangling containers and images.

Step 1: cleaning containers (don’t worry, it destroys only stopped containers)

docker ps -aq| xargs docker rm

Step 2: removing dangling images

docker rmi $(docker images -q --filter "dangling=true")

Docker itself offers a number of tools to prune and clean up space

  1. Inspecting docker filesystem: docker system df
  2. Pruning stopped containers: docker container prune
  3. Removing all unused local volumes: docker volume prune
  4. docker system prune will remove
    • all stopped containers
    • all networks not used by at least one container
    • all dangling images
    • all dangling build cache