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vintrojan
vintrojan

Reputation: 1547

How can I reduce the disk space used by docker?

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 via 'docker rmi -f' command.

But the space occupied by these images has not been released. If I run 'docker images' command, the deleted images are not listed in the output of 'docker images' command(but the disk space is not cleaned up).

How can I improve (ie. reduce) the disk space used by docker?

Upvotes: 96

Views: 122503

Answers (9)

Lee Goddard
Lee Goddard

Reputation: 11173

In addition to the use of docker prune -a, be aware of this issue: Windows 10: Docker does not release disk space after deleting all images and containers #244.

It is a frighteningly long and complicated bug report that has been open since 2016 and has yet to be resolved, but might be addressed through the "Troubleshoot" screen's "Clean/Purge Data" function:

enter image description here

enter image description here

I have just used this to re-claim 100 gig.

WARNING: This of course deletes all the data concerned.

Upvotes: 6

xab
xab

Reputation: 1256

First to find out what is using the space:
docker system df see docs

In my case most of it was used by "Build cache", to remove it:
docker builder prune see docs

Upvotes: 19

Nick
Nick

Reputation: 10153

My disk was used 80%, but a calculation of file sizes on the disk showed about 10% of usage.

In my case cleaning docker caches, volumes, images, and logs not helped. But helped restart of docker service:

sudo systemctl restart docker

After this usage of the disk has become equal to the expected 10%.

Upvotes: 3

ns15
ns15

Reputation: 8824

On windows with docker desktop running on wsl2 there is an option in GUI to purge data. enter image description here

select wsl2 when prompted for data store.

Note: This option will remove all of your docker data. If you don't wish to do so then try the prune option mentioned by others in this thread.

Upvotes: 13

user959690
user959690

Reputation: 620

If your space is full in my experience docker prune will just hang. You need to manually delete the volumes.

Upvotes: 2

Artur Barseghyan
Artur Barseghyan

Reputation: 14222

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

If you haven't got what you expected, try the following

docker volume prune

It will remove all local volumes not used by at least one container.

Upvotes: 135

Binita Bharati
Binita Bharati

Reputation: 5908

docker system prune works perfectly on my machine running Ubuntu 20 and docker 20.10.2.

Upvotes: 0

Anmol Narang
Anmol Narang

Reputation: 551

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.

Upvotes: 5

VonC
VonC

Reputation: 1328152

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.

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)

Upvotes: 23

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