How to delete untagged images from AWS ECR Container Registry

Question

When pushing images to Amazon ECR, if the tag already exists within the repo the old image remains within the registry but goes in an untagged state.

So if i docker push image/haha:1.0.0 the second time i do this (provided that something changes) the first image gets untagged from AWS ECR.

Is there a way to safely clean up all the registries from untagged images?

Answer 1

You can delete all images in a single request, without loops:

IMAGES_TO_DELETE=$( aws ecr list-images --region $ECR_REGION --repository-name $ECR_REPO --filter "tagStatus=UNTAGGED" --query 'imageIds[*]' --output json )

aws ecr batch-delete-image --region $ECR_REGION --repository-name $ECR_REPO --image-ids "$IMAGES_TO_DELETE" || true

First it gets a list of images that are untagged, in json format:

[ {"imageDigest": "sha256:..."}, {"imageDigest": "sha256:..."}, ... ]

Then it sends that list to batch-image-delete.

The last || true is required to avoid an error code when there are no untagged images.