Docker how to remove all images

Deleting all docker images and containers

I am very new to Docker and enjoying it very much.

I want to delete all images and containers from local as well as from docker hub. Is there any single command to do that?

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To remove all containers,

-v : Remove all associated volumes

To remove all images,

-a : for all containers, even not running, (or images)

-q : to remove all the details other than the ID of containers (or images)

Warning

to delete all containers:

to delete all images:

Note that you can’t revert and you can’t kill containers which running, you should stop them before

See all the existing images:

See all the existing containers:

Delete single image:

Delete single container:

Delete multiple images:

Delete multiple containers:

Stop all containers and remove them:

Delete all images:

Delete both all stopped containers and images in a single command:

Complete Guide for Removing Docker Images

If you keep on creating docker images, you’ll soon start to run out of space. Deleting old and unused docker images will free up plenty of disk space for you.

In this article, I’ll discuss various scenarios of deleting docker images from your system.

Ways to remove docker images

First, check the docker images present on your system with this command:

The output will show all the docker images and their image ID. You need this image name (under repository column) or the Image ID to delete a docker image from your system.

With the Image ID, you can remove the docker image in the following manner:

You may also use this command as both are the same:

Here’s what the output may look like:

If you use the image ID, it will remove all the images associated with that ID.

Remove docker image associated with a container

Life would have been so much simpler if you could just remove docker images like that. But that doesn’t happen often.

If you have containers associated with the docker image, you’ll encounter some errors when you try removing the image.

You must stop the container first:

The problem is that even if you stop the container, it will still complain if you try to remove the image:

You have two options here:

To remove a container and then remove the image, you can use something like this:

Remove docker image associated with multiple containers

Life would still be a tad bit simpler if a docker image was associated with only one container. But an image can have multiple containers associated with it and removing that kind of docker image becomes a pain.

You’ll see an error like this:

First, you need to find all containers associated with an image name (not ID).

And then you need to stop all of them. You may use the container IDs one by one but that will be too time-consuming. You can use the magic of pipe and xargs to stop all the containers associated with an image:

And then you can either remove the stopped containers or force remove the image (as you saw in the previous section).

If you want to remove all the containers associated with an image, just run this command:

And now you can remove the docker image using the command shown earlier in this tutorial.

Removing multiple docker images at once

You can also remove multiple docker images in one single command. It’s the same as the previous command. You just have to specify the image IDs or the image names.

Of course, you’ll have to stop any running containers associated with the images.

Remove all unused and dangling docker images at once

Before you see that, let me explain what is unused and dangling images are:

Any docker image that has any kind of containers associated to it (stopped or running) is a used image. If a docker image has no containers associated, it becomes and unused docker image.

A dangling docker image “means that you’ve created the new build of the image, but it wasn’t given a new name. So the old images you have becomes the dangling image. Those old image are the ones that are untagged and displays on its name when you run ‘docker images’ command.”

If you want to remove the dangling images, you can use the prune option:

You should see the space it frees up at the end of the output:

You can be a bit smart with the prune command and remove only old unused and dangling images. So if you want to remove the ones older than 24 hours, use it like this:

Remove all docker images from your system

Perhaps you are in a testing environment and you want to start afresh by removing all the docker images.

To remove all docker images, you need to first stop all the running containers.

Now you can delete all the images this way:

That’s it. I think that’s enough reference material for removing docker images and you should have a better understanding of this topic now. You may also check out the tutorial to remove docker containers.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please leave a comment below.

How to Remove Docker Images, Containers and Volumes

Docker is an open-source, powerful, secure, reliable and efficient container platform that enables realistic independence between applications and infrastructure. It is being widely adopted by IT and cloud companies out there, to easily to create, deploy, and run applications.

A container is a technology for visualizing operating systems, that enables an application to be packaged with everything needed to run it, allowing it to run independently from the operating system. A container image is a self-contained, executable package of an application that includes everything needed to run it: code, runtime, system tools and libraries, as well as configurations.

We have already covered a series on Docker, that explains how to install Docker, run applications into containers and automatically build docker images with dockerfile.

In this article, we will explain how to remove docker images, containers and volumes via the docker command line tool in Linux systems.

How to Remove Docker Images

Before you remove any docker images, you can list all existing images on your system with the image management command.

Looking at the output in the screenshot that follows, we have some images without a tag (showing instead), these are referred to as “dangling images”. They no longer have any relationship to any tagged images; they are not useful anymore and only consume disk space.

List Docker Images

You can remove one or more old or unused Docker images using the image ID, for example (where d65c4d6a3580 is the image ID).

List Dangling Docker Images

To remove all dangling images, allowing you to reclaim wasted disk space, use any of these commands.

Remove All Dangling Images

To remove all not associated with any container, use the following command.

How to Remove Docker Containers

You can start by listing all docker containers on your system using following command.

List Docker Containers

Once you have identified the container (s) you want to delete, you can remove them using their ID, for example.

If a container is running, you can first stop it and remove it as shown.

You can remove containers using filters as well. For example to remove all exited containers, use this command.

To stop and remove all containers, use the following commands.

How To Remove Docker Volumes

As before, begin by listing all docker volumes on your system with the volume management command as shown.

To remove one or more volumes, use the following command (note that you can’t remove a volume that is in use by a container).

To remove dangling volumes, use the following command.

To remove all unused local volumes, run the following command. This will remove volumes interactively.

How to Remove Unused or Dangling Images, Containers, Volumes, and Networks

You can delete all dangling and unreferenced data such as containers stopped, images without containers, with this single command. By default, volumes are not removed, to prevent vital data from being deleted if there is currently no container using the volume.

Note: In order to run the docker command line tool without the sudo command, you need to add a user to docker group, for instance.

For more information, see the help page for the above docker object management commands.

That’s all for now! In this article, we have explained how to remove docker images, containers and volumes via the docker command line tool. If you have any questions or thoughts to share, use the feedback form below to reach us.

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Docker Remove Image: How to Delete Docker Images Explained with Examples

We live in an era where storage is becoming cheaper everyday. We can just send everything to the cloud and pay almost nothing.

So why would we need to worry about deleting Docker images?

First of all, there are still some mission critical workloads that can’t be moved to the cloud, especially those in heavily regulated industries like law or healthcare.

But to better answer that question, I would say that we as developers often find ourselves out of space on our local machines.

Let’s do a quick analysis of this StackOverflow public dataset to explore that further:

Query Results:

So it does’t happen just with me, right? Look at how many views we have on those StackOverflow posts. If you are wondering, the number is 465687 views for posts matching the search query.

Luckily for us, today we are going to see some easy-to-use examples on how to delete our dangling and unused docker images to help ourselves out.

What are dangling and unused Docker images?

What is the difference between dangling and unused images, you might ask?

A dangling image means that you’ve created a new build of the image but haven’t given it a new name. Think about those old, forgotten images that no one knows what to do with anymore – those are «dangling images».

On the other hand, an unused image means that it has not been assigned or is not being used in a container.

Delete Docker Images

Now let’s see some examples of how to delete Docker images.

Our case study

The Busy Cat Corp is a fictional company that captures cat behavior data, and provides recommendations to cat owners on how to make their pets busier and happier.

All their workloads are containerized, and they use the following database images:
cassandra, postgres, mysql and mongo.

Their developers are constantly running out of space on their machines, and they are top users of StackOverflow – aren’t we all?

So they asked us for some quick examples of how to delete some images and get their space back.

First let’s take a look at the machine of one of their developers.

Output

That’s cool, they have all the images from their workloads downloaded. But look at the disk space – it’s more than 2GB! Let’s see what we can do for them.

Delete Docker dangling images

We’ll start by looking for dangling images.

Output

We have one, so we are going to clear it up.

Delete the dangling image

Delete Docker unused images

Next we are looking for unused images.

Output

We only have one container running the mysql image, so all the other images are unused.

So that we don’t have to do it manually, we can put together a script that shows all of the unused images to verify them.

Output

Then it deletes the unused images.

After deleting both dangling and unused images we can look at what we have left.

Output

So we only have the mysql image remaining, that’s great!

Delete all obsolete Docker images with prune

Those commands sound great, but a second developer said they didn’t care about the differences between dangling and unused images.

All they wanted was to clear obsolete images and get their disk space back.

Personally this is what I usually do.

So we can just use Docker’s prune commands.

This will delete both unused and dangling images. Or in other words images without at least one container associated with them.

Note: this is why we needed to first delete the stopped containers in the code above.

Wrapping up

In this article we saw how to delete Docker Images, and we used a fictional company to explain it with some easy-to-use examples.

It’s important to point out that you shouldn’t use Docker to keep a history of your old images. For a developer environment that’s fine, and you can even automate the image clean up workload if you have to deal with a lot of them.

But for a production workload, you should be using a Container Registry solution to handle your Docker images.

There are many Container Registry solutions out there, like Google Cloud Platform with Artifact Registry and Docker Enterprise with Docker Trusted Registry. And if you are in the open source world, you can just use Docker Hub :).

Thanks for reading!

* Illustrations by Icons 8 from Icons8

If you found this helpful, or wish to challenge or extend anything raised here, feel free to contact me on Twitter or Linkedin. Let’s connect!

How does one remove a Docker image?

I’m running Docker under Vagrant under OS X 10.8.4 (Mountain Lion), and whenever I try to delete a saved image, I get an error:

How can I delete an image?

19 Answers 19

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The following are some of the ways to remove docker images/containers:

Remove single image

Remove all images

Kill containers and remove them:

Note: Replace kill with stop for graceful shutdown

Remove all images except «my-image»

Use grep to remove all except my-image and ubuntu

Delete all docker containers

Delete all docker images

To remove an image from Docker using the image ID:

Get the list of all Images

Identify the image ID of the image you want to delete, for example:

Finally remove the image using the image ID (only the first three digits are required)

Image:

docker rmi image_name

Container:

docker rm container_id

With Docker 1.13 (Q4 2016), you now have:

docker system prune will delete ALL unused data (i.e., in order: containers stopped, volumes without containers and images with no containers).

See PR 26108 and commit 86de7c0, which are introducing a few new commands to help facilitate visualizing how much space the Docker daemon data is taking on disk and allowing for easily cleaning up «unneeded» excess.

Removing Containers

To remove a specific container

For single image

For multiple images

Remove exited containers

Remove all the containers

Removing Images

Remove specific images

for single image

for multiple images

Remove dangling images
Dangling images are layers that have no relationship to any tagged images as the Docker images are constituted of multiple images.

Remove all Docker images

Removing Volumes

To list volumes, run docker volume ls

Remove a specific volume

Remove dangling volumes

Remove a container and its volumes

docker rm container_name

docker rmi image_name

rm Remove one or more containers

rmi Remove one or more images

Find container ID,

First of all, we have to stop and remove the Docker containers which are attached with the Docker image that we are going to remove.

So for that, first

For versions 1.13 and higher:

the [OPTIONS] seem to have no difference.

CLI restructured

These changes let us clean up the Docker CLI syntax, improve help text and make Docker simpler to use. The old command syntax is still supported, but we encourage everybody to adopt the new syntax.

Also, you can also use filter parameters to remove set of images at once:

So you can delete that filter images like this:

Delete all of them using

Step 1: Kill all containers

Step 2: RM them first

Step 3: Delete the images using force

Use the step 1 in case you are getting error saying it cant be deleted owing to child dependencies

I use this on production since we deploy several times a day on multiple servers, and I don’t want to go to every server to clean up (that would be a pain).

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

Here’s a shell script to remove a tagged (named) image and it’s containers. Save as docker-rmi and run using ‘docker-rmi my-image-name’

In my case the probleme is that I have tow images withe same name the solution is to add the tag after the name or the id

Before I used docker-compose, I wrote my own shell script, then I had to customize the script whenever needed especially when application architecture changed. Now I don’t have to do this anymore, thanks to docker-compose.

For me the following worked fine:

Then go ahead and remove an image by running some like these:

REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID CREATED SIZE 88282f8eda00 19 seconds ago 308.5 MB 13e5d3d682f4 19 hours ago 663 MB busybox2 latest 05fe66bb1144 20 hours ago 1.129 MB ubuntu 16.04 00fd29ccc6f1 5 days ago 110.5 MB ubuntu 14.04 67759a80360c 5 days ago 221.4 MB python 2.7 9e92c8430ba0 7 days ago 680.7 MB busybox latest 6ad733544a63 6 weeks ago 1.129 MB ubuntu 16.10 7d3f705d307c 5 months ago 106.7 MB

Deleted: sha256:88282f8eda0036f85b5652c44d158308c6f86895ef1345dfa788318e6ba31194 Deleted: sha256:4f211a991fb392cd794bc9ad8833149cd9400c5955958c4017b1e2dc415e25e9 Deleted: sha256:8cc6917ac7f0dcb74969ae7958fe80b4a4ea7b3223fc888dfe1aef42f43df6f8 Deleted: sha256:b74a8932cff5e61c3fd2cc39de3c0989bdfd5c2e5f72b8f99f2807595f8ece43

Delete by force:

Deleted: sha256:13e5d3d682f4de973780b35a3393c46eb314ef3db45d3ae83baf2dd9d702747e Deleted: sha256:3ad9381c7041c03768ccd855ec86caa6bc0244223f10b0465c4898bdb21dc378 Deleted: sha256:5ccb917bce7bc8d3748eccf677d7b60dd101ed3e7fd2aedebd521735276606af Deleted: sha256:18356d19b91f0abcc04496729c9a4c49e695dbfe3f0bb1c595f30a7d4d264ebf