Cleanup disk space occupied by Docker images

Question

I am running docker on windows 10.

I had a couple of images stored in my machine. The total size of these images accumulated to around ~10GB. I have deleted these images

Answer 1

To clean the system memory there are three steps:

1. Delete docker image
2. docker system prune -a
3. quit the docker container app

This worked for me. Around 30gb of space was cleaned after doing the above mentioned steps.

Answer 2

First try to run:

docker system prune

It will remove:

• all stopped containers
• all volumes not used by at least one container
• all networks not used by at least one container
• all dangling images

If that's not enough, do:

docker system prune -a

It will remove:

• all stopped containers
• all volumes not used by at least one container
• all networks not used by at least one container
• all images without at least one container associated to

Answer 3

Update Q4 2016: as I mention in "How to remove old and unused Docker images", use:

docker image prune -a

(more precise than docker system prune)

It will remove dangling and unused images. Warning: 'unused' means "images not referenced by any container": be careful before using -a.

Then check if the disk space for images has shrunk accordingly.

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Original answer:

See the Medium article "How to clean up Docker (~5GB junk!)" from katopz.

It refers to the docker-cleanup script, for removing old exited process, and dangling images.
I have my own aliases as well.

But it also mentions that, since docker 1.10, you now have named volumes that need to be removed as well:

docker volume rm $(docker volume ls -qf dangling=true)