how to clean up docker overlay directory?

tedder42 picture tedder42 · Jul 30, 2015 · Viewed 65k times · Source

I'm running docker via CoreOS and AWS's ECS. I had a failing image that got restarted many times, and the containers are still around- they filled my drive partition. Specifically, /var/lib/docker/overlay/ contains a large number of files/directories.

I know that docker-cleanup-volumes is a thing, but it cleans the /volumes directory, not the /overlay directory.

docker ps -a shows over 250 start attempts on my bad docker container. They aren't running, though.

Aside from rm -rf /var/lib/docker/overlay/*, how can I/should I clean this up?

Answer

user3774109 picture user3774109 · Sep 11, 2017

From our side we used:

sudo docker system prune -a -f

Which save me 3Go !

We use also the famous commands :

sudo docker rm -v $(sudo docker ps -a -q -f status=exited)
sudo docker rmi -f  $(sudo docker images -f "dangling=true" -q)
docker volume ls -qf dangling=true | xargs -r docker volume rm

We put that on cron to manage a little bit more efficently our disk space.

Cheers

Reference: https://forums.docker.com/t/some-way-to-clean-up-identify-contents-of-var-lib-docker-overlay/30604/4