Useful tricks to clean up your Docker dev environment -

Many of us who develop with Docker often find that we are:

Building layers upon layers of images
Running a whole fleet of containers originating from various base images and different versions of our own apps

After all, being able to quickly build, spin up and test various code and environment combinations is one of the greatest benefits of container-based development. And there’s no better way to test your changes than running a few environments in parallel and switching between them. It’s blue-green deployment and A/B testing at your fingertips! But even the strongest development machine has resource limitations. Eventually, we need to remove images and kill some containers just to be able to build and run new versions.

So here are a few useful command-line tricks to help you clean up your working environment.

- Remove all stopped containers:

docker rm $(docker ps -a -q)

1	docker rm $(docker ps -a -q)

- Remove all untagged images:

docker images -q --filter "dangling=true" | xargs docker rmi

1	docker images -q --filter "dangling=true" \| xargs docker rmi

Note: Use ‘docker rmi -f‘ to force the removal of images even if there are some stopped containers based on them .

- Remove all containers based on specific image:

docker ps --filter ancestor=codefresh/golang:1.1 -q | xargs -l docker stop

1	docker ps --filter ancestor=codefresh/golang:1.1 -q \| xargs -l docker stop

Note : You will need to replace codefresh/golang:1.1 with your own <repository>:<tag> in the last command.
If you omit the :<tag> – ‘docker ps’ will return only the containers based on the ‘latest’ tag of the specified image. They are the ones that will get stopped.

- Remove unused data volumes ( thanks to Pierre F. for the suggestion )

docker volume rm $(docker volume ls -qf dangling=true)

1	docker volume rm $(docker volume ls -qf dangling=true)

Got more tricks of your own? Please leave them in comments.

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8 responses to “Useful tricks to clean up your Docker dev environment”

Hello, thanks for this article !

You also have this one to clean the unused volumes:

docker volume rm $(docker volume ls -qf dangling=true)

Hi Pierre!
Indeed – cleaning up the data volumes is also very important.
Thanks for the feedback! We’ll add it to the post body.

Ant

On MacOS Sierra Beta, I get an error on this one, removing the -l on the ‘xargs’ and it seems to work fine.

➜ ~ docker images -q –filter “dangling=true” | xargs -l docker rmi
xargs: illegal option — l
usage: xargs [-0opt] [-E eofstr] [-I replstr [-R replacements]] [-J replstr]
[-L number] [-n number [-x]] [-P maxprocs] [-s size]
[utility [argument …]]

Anton Weiss says:

at

Hi Jim!
You’re right – the ‘-l’ option is unsupported in OSX version of xargs.
As a matter of fact – in this case it can be omitted on Linux as well.
Thanks, we’ll update the post.

Reply

This article identifies some useful utilities for doing this sort of thing using, you guessed it, a container. Spotify and Janitor are pretty good for some use cases :-

https://www.brianchristner.io/docker-cleanup-script-comparison/

HTHs

Fraser.

Brittany Ingram says:

at

Thanks for the tips Fraser!

Reply

Or you know, just do it the easy way and use Spotify’s Docker-GC https://github.com/spotify/docker-gc

Anton Weiss says:

at

Hmm, this looks like a great little tool! Wasn’t aware of it. Thanks a lot for bringing it to our attention, Zachary!

Reply