How to remove old and unused Docker images

Question

When running Docker for a long time, there are a lot of images in system. How can I remove all unused Docker images at once safety to free up the storage?

In additio

Answer 1

Here is a script to clean up Docker images and reclaim the space.

#!/bin/bash -x
## Removing stopped container
docker ps -a | grep Exited | awk '{print $1}' | xargs docker rm

## If you do not want to remove all container you can have filter for days and weeks old like below
#docker ps -a | grep Exited | grep "days ago" | awk '{print $1}' | xargs docker rm
#docker ps -a | grep Exited | grep "weeks ago" | awk '{print $1}' | xargs docker rm

## Removing Dangling images
## There are the layers images which are being created during building a Docker image. This is a great way to recover the spaces used by old and unused layers.

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

## Removing images of perticular pattern For example
## Here I am removing images which has a SNAPSHOT with it.

docker rmi $(docker images | grep SNAPSHOT | awk '{print $3}')

## Removing weeks old images

docker images | grep "weeks ago" | awk '{print $3}' | xargs docker rmi

## Similarly you can remove days, months old images too.

Original script

https://github.com/vishalvsh1/docker-image-cleanup

Usually Docker keeps all temporary files related to image building and layers at

/var/lib/docker

This path is local to the system, usually at THE root partition, "/".

You can mount a bigger disk space and move the content of /var/lib/docker to the new mount location and make a symbolic link.

This way, even if Docker images occupy space, it will not affect your system as it will be using some other mount location.

Original post: Manage Docker images on local disk