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?
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.
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
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!
