Cleaning up Docker

With the passage of time running Docker in development, we tend to accumulate a lot of unused images. Sometimes for testing, research or just trying out fun new stuff. Its always cool to run new software in containers, lights up new possibilities for those of us interested in constantly learning new technologies. Downside is a lot of precious SSD memory occupied with rarely used or unused images, the worse thing is we hardly notice. But the guys at Docker Inc. have done a great task by keeping a track of all things Docker.

Say hello to the system command, part of the docker management commands and simply awesomeness. The system command provides info from disk usage to system-wide information, ain’t that cool.

Disk usage using df command:

$ docker system df

Returns something like this,

TYPE              TOTAL     ACTIVE     SIZE         RECLAIMABLE
Images            35        6          8.332GB      7.364GB (88%)
Containers        12        12         417.6MB      0B (0%)
Local Volumes     67        2          2.828GB      2.828GB (100%)
Build Cache                            0B           0B

Notice the Reclaimable this is the size you can recover, it is calculated by subtracting the size of active images from the size of total images.

Real time events using events command:

$ docker system events

Returns the list of real time events from the server, based on Docker object types.

Formatting output

$ docker system events --format 'Type={{.Type}}  Status={{.Status}}  ID={{.ID}}'

or simply format the output as JSON

$ docker system events --format '{{json .}}'

System-wide info using info command:

Another cool command to get all the system related information is the info command. You will be amazed to see the amount of info you can get.

$ docker system info

Remove unused data using prune command:

Now that we have all the info we need, its cleanup time, but beware against using this command half asleep.

$ docker system prune
WARNING! This will remove:
        - all stopped containers
        - all networks not used by at least one container
        - all dangling images
        - all build cache
Are you sure you want to continue? [y/N]

Further we can remove exactly what we want, using any of the following commands, feast you eyes ladies and gents.

$ docker system prune -a --volumes
$ docker image prune
$ docker container prune
$ docker volume prune
$ docker network prune

All of the above commands will prompt for confirmation, so wash your face with cold water or take a shot of Espresso before issuing any of these ;).