How can I delete Docker's images?

Question

I\'ve the following images:

alex@alexvps:~$ sudo docker images
REPOSITORY          TAG                 IMAGE ID            CREATED             VIRTUAL SIZE
&         


        

Answer 1

The most compact version of a command to remove all untagged images is:

docker rmi $(docker images | grep "^<none>" | awk '{print $"3"}')

Answer 2

To delete some Docker image you must execute the following command:

$ docker rmi <docker_image_id>

So, to delete all Docker images you can execute the following command:

$ docker rmi $(docker images -q)

Now, if you want delete all Docker images (including images that are in use), you can add the flag -f, for example:

$ docker rmi -f $(docker images -q)

Answer 3

Remove all the containers

docker ps -q -a | xargs docker rm

Force remove all the Docker images

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

Answer 4

The image could be currently used by a running container, so you first have to stop and remove the container(s).

docker stop <container-name>
docker rm <container-id>

Then you could try deleting the image:

docker rmi <image-id>

You must be sure that this image doesn't depend on other images (otherwise you must delete them first).

I had a strange case in which I had no more containers still alive (docker ps -a returned nothing) but I couldn't manage to delete the image and its image-dependency.

To solve these special cases you could force the image removal with this:

docker rmi -f <image-id>

Answer 5

In Bash:

for i in `sudo docker images|grep \<none\>|awk '{print $3}'`;do sudo docker rmi $i;done

This will remove all images with name "<none>". I found those images redundant.

Answer 6

If you want to automatically/periodically clean up exited containers and remove images and volumes that aren't in use by a running container you can download the Docker image meltwater/docker-cleanup.

That way you don't need to go clean it up by hand.

Just run:

docker run -d -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:rw  -v /var/lib/docker:/var/lib/docker:rw --restart=unless-stopped meltwater/docker-cleanup:latest

It will run every 30 minutes (or however long you set it using DELAY_TIME=1800 option) and clean up exited containers and images.

More details: https://github.com/meltwater/docker-cleanup/blob/master/README.md