Still plagued by my undersized root / partition, I’ve had to learn a thing or
two about freeing up disk space. Recently, after a string of adventures with
containers, I came to realize that Docker stores it’s images in the root
partition, by default at least.
To remove the images I have stored locally, and free up disk space, we first
need to list out the images we have downloaded, which will look something like
this:
% docker images
REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID CREATED SIZE
mysql latest 91b53e2624b4 6 weeks ago 565MB
adminer latest 8e4345c1c3dc 6 weeks ago 250MB
mysql 8 8189e588b0e8 3 months ago 564MB
ubuntu 20.04 88bd68917189 3 months ago 72.8MB
php 7.4-apache 8b6f3afc00ee 3 months ago 798MB
mono 6 af8a21454b9a 7 months ago 788MB
mono latest af8a21454b9a 7 months ago 788MB
debian 10 53906583a002 7 months ago 114MB
debian latest 446440c01886 7 months ago 124MB
mongo 4.2 df2171176868 7 months ago 388MB
ubuntu 22.04 6b7dfa7e8fdb 7 months ago 77.8MB
mysql 5.7 d410f4167eea 7 months ago 495MB
redis 5.0 99ee9af2b6b1 8 months ago 110MB
php <none> 20a3732f422b 8 months ago 453MBTo remove an image, you can then use the following command:
% docker rmi NAMEOFIMAGENot much to it, but it doesn’t always go according to plan. If the image you’d
like to remove is still tied to a container, you’ll receive a message like this:
% docker rmi adminer
Error response from daemon: conflict: unable to remove repository reference "adminer" (must force) - container b73f553d6fc1 is using its referenced image 8e4345c1c3dcNever fear though, all you have to do is remove the container that’s blocking
things:
% docker rm b73f553d6fc1
b73f553d6fc1And then, simply try again:
% docker rmi adminer
Untagged: adminer:latest
Untagged: adminer@sha256:bb57616441db7d9bcf04f9e231bf8fd066b209374f0e30384d17988cbb4e889b
Deleted: sha256:8e4345c1c3dc89b4c31146abe340fa39e143d922d1e3401233d7ac32db2d985d
Deleted: sha256:e0e5293a8dac2c93826e3cc883686cbef1b587f34ad1d9ea0e94f1bf7affeb78
Deleted: sha256:9ddc8930c09d6d725484993e70deb3d5a8fb9ca0b4ecd385cc4d93174b869579
Deleted: sha256:fede545bed63aeacf77d6e41a73d8a362eb49227d5fe39d0f447723eace99cbb
Deleted: sha256:ee5f8184868400dbcce39cd4918c3d0d91da3807cb37c32b2260eda852d2c8e1
Deleted: sha256:b7c40e2d7d736aa7880fcf4ebe6ee0c075a4ed16cec4c80592b0abcaee082664
Deleted: sha256:d96b1a9770a32366607324d4657d0fea0aee738e227e8941aab59a53754508d4
Deleted: sha256:c28dd92cbb2619b4dc09bf09ef075bf5eedb4e471ff21a109fcb05437e2c0c7bYou may have to remove containers a few times before you can remove the image complete, so repeat as necessary!
