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Is there an elegant way or a best practice when it comes to deleting old images from the Docker registry?

I see a lot of requests/issues here: https://github.com/docker/docker-registry/labels/delete, but didn't find a good/popular solution for it.

So, is there a tool or a technique which would help me do that?

Also, is there any best practices which you follow while doing it?

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    Are you asking how to clean the registry? (Which is the link and question you provide), but the accepted answer is not cleaning the registry, but cleaning your local docker.
    – dalore
    Apr 19, 2018 at 10:54

4 Answers 4

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10

I've had good luck with Spotify/docker-gc. It can be run from cron or as a docker container.

A simple Docker container and image garbage collection script.

  • Containers that exited more than an hour ago are removed.
  • Images that don't belong to any remaining container after that are removed.
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    At first glance, it seems to be, behind all the bash stuff, more or less a subset of the one-liners from @rombob 's answer. Is that true, or is there some "intelligence" in docker-gc that I am missing?
    – AnoE
    Nov 16, 2017 at 14:39
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    Op links and asks a question on how to clean from the registry, but docker-gc doesn't clean from the registry, it just cleans from your local machine. I guess OP was really asking how to clean up locally
    – dalore
    Apr 19, 2018 at 10:53
  • Docker-gc's page now recommends to use docker system prune instead. But I didn't find how to exclude some images from removing with Docker's prune. It there a way to exclude some images with docker system prune?
    – Alexander Artemenko
    Sep 4, 2019 at 9:24
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Can't call it's the best practice but this is what we use triggered by cron, happy to see better suggestions.

echo "safely removing untagged images"
docker rmi $(docker images | awk '/<none>/{print $3}')

echo "safely removing stopped containers"
docker rm $(docker ps -a -q)

echo "safely removing old containers"
docker ps -a | awk '/weeks ago|months ago|days ago/{print $1}' | xargs --no-run-if-empty docker rm

echo "safely removing old images"
docker images | awk '/weeks ago|months ago|days ago/{print $3}' | xargs --no-run-if-empty docker rmi

echo "safely removing old volumes, custom rebuild of martin/docker-cleanup-volumes image"
docker run -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -v $(readlink -f /var/lib/docker):/var/lib/docker --rm example/docker-cleanup-volumes

echo "native cleanup Docker => 12"
docker system prune -f
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  • Please don't chain grep and awk, do the same filter just before the awk command ` regex { command }`
    – Tensibai
    Mar 27, 2017 at 19:14
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    @Tensibai anything to make AWK wizards happy :)
    – rombob
    Mar 27, 2017 at 20:32
  • Just in case, that's not just pedantic , you save process spawn and a large bunch of context changes :) It doesn't change much here, but any occasion to advocate for it is good :)
    – Tensibai
    Mar 27, 2017 at 20:53
  • @Tensibai definitely, good habits pay off with time, spawns cost us time and money :)
    – rombob
    Mar 27, 2017 at 20:57
  • Specially when you parse/format billions lines log files to prepare for R input :) Here I don't expect more than a few dozen lines.
    – Tensibai
    Mar 27, 2017 at 20:59
4

On my local machine (mac) I have a little script I found that I run periodically which cleans all the excess images up clean-docker-for-mac.sh

For my servers I run meltwater/docker-cleanup which periodically cleans up exited containers and removes images and volumes that aren't in use.

I use a lot of different Docker images for my work on Codemason that scripts like these are necessity for me. Enjoy!

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0

docker system prune --volumes

Is the way to do this since v17. Docs here

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