how to clean up docker overlay directory?

Question

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 1

From our side we used:

sudo docker system prune -a -f

Which saved me 3Go!

We also used 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.

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

Disclaimer

Careful with that 3rd command (... xargs -r docker volume rm). Make sure the containers that may use those volumes are running when you run this. Otherwise, they will be seen as dangling, and therefore deleted.

Answer 2

docker builder prune

this helps cleaning up the docker overlay2 folder

Answer 3

Here's the hacky way I'm doing this right now. I'm not going to accept it as an answer because I'm hoping there's a better way.

# delete old docker processes
docker rm `docker ps -a | grep Exited | awk '{print $1 }'`
  ignore_errors: true

# delete old images. will complain about still-in-use images.
docker rmi `docker images -aq`

Answer 4

I have added this to bashrc in my dev environment, and gotten used to running it every day or so.

function cleanup_docker() {
  docker ps -f status=exited -q | xargs -r docker rm
  docker images -f dangling=true -q | xargs -r docker rmi
}

In some cases, the following script can free up more space, as it will try to remove all images, and just fail silently:

function cleanup_docker_aggressive() {
  for i in $(docker images --no-trunc -q | sort -u)
  do
    docker rmi $i 2> /dev/null
  done
}

Sadly, they're not significantly cleaner than your solution.

EDIT: Starting with Docker 1.13, you can use docker system:

docker system df    # to check what is using space
docker system prune # cleans up also networks, build cache, etc

EDIT: Starting with Docker 2017.09, you can also use container and image

docker container prune
docker image prune -a

the latter you can use with fancy filters like --filter "until=24h"

Answer 5

It's not real!

/var/lib/docker/overlay2, as the name suggests, contains a bunch of overlay file systems (good intro here). Run mount | grep overlay2 and you will see that all the /var/lib/docker/overlay2/*/merged folders are of mounts of type overlay. This means that what du says isn't real. To get a sense of how much space is actually being used in those folders (on disk) you need to limit your attention to just the upper directory of the overlayfs mount (called diff in docker's case), e.g.:

du -sch /var/lib/docker/overlay2/*/diff
...
3.8G    total

for comparison, in my case:

> du -sch /var/lib/docker/overlay2
...
17G total

---

Update

It seems that you can also simply use du's -x/--one-file-system option ("skip directories on different file systems") to only see the real part:

> du -schx /var/lib/docker/overlay2

Answer 6

We just started having this problem, and btafarelo's answer got me part of the way, or at least made me feel better about removing the sha256 entries.

System info: ec2 instances running CoreOS 1.12 behind an ELB

• Drain the docker instance from the ELB

• Shutdown docker

  systemctl stop docker
  rm -rf /var/lib/docker/overlay/*
  

• Execute the results of the commands

  for d in $(find /var/lib/docker/image/overlay -type d -name '*sha256*'); do echo rm -rf $d/* ; done
  

• reboot (easiest way to bring everything back up)

This recovered about 25% of the disk after the services restarted with no ill side affects.

Answer 7

docker ps

• --quiet

• --all

• --filter status=exited

---

docker rm

• --force

---

docker images

• --quiet
• --all
• --filter dangling=true

---

docker rmi

• -- force

---

Your hacky way is fine.

docker rm `docker ps -a | grep Exited | awk '{print $1 }'`

My hacky way is

docker rm $(docker ps --all | awk '/ago/{print $1}')

A slightly cleaner way is to run docker ps with the --quiet (-q) flag to get just the id number and --filter status=exited to --filter just the exited ones.

docker rm $(docker ps --filter status=exited --quiet) # remove stopped docker processes

or to run docker rm with the --force (-f) flag and docker ps with the --all (-a) flag to shut down even the running ones

docker rm --force $(docker ps --all --quiet) # remove all docker processes

---

What's probably taking up all that disk space after several failed builds is the images. To conserve disk space on the docker host, periodically remove unused docker images with

docker rmi $(docker images --filter dangling=true --quiet) # clean dangling docker images

or to get more aggressive, you can --force (-f) it to clean up --all (-a) images

docker rmi --force $(docker images --all --quiet) # clean all possible docker images

---

@analytik 's way of putting it into a .bashrc function seems like a practical idea

function cleanup_docker() {
  docker rm --force $(docker ps --all --quiet) # remove all docker processes
  docker rmi $(docker images --filter dangling=true --quiet) # clean dangling docker images
}

and if you're in the habit of generating lots of docker images that you don't need, add it to .bash_logout

---

Answer 8

Please be aware that docker prune commands do not clean /var/lib/docker/overlay2 directory. It is also not advised to remove only the overlay directory as it may impact existing containers. I have searched for a lot of articles but couldn't find any solution to clean overlay directory other than cleaning the entire docker state:

# Please understand that this will restart the docker engine in a completely empty state 
# i.e. you will lose all images, containers, volumes, networks, swarm state, etc. 
# You can obviously first take the backup of the directories that you want to keep and copy the contents back after restarting docker service.

service stop docker
rm -rf /var/lib/docker
service start docker

The last command brings the docker service back up with all the folders inside /var/lib/docker again.

Answer 9

I followed these simple steps

Step 1: df -h [checked the memory used, to be sure, memory is used by overlay folder].

Step 2: sudo docker system prune [this cmd removes all unused containers/images/networks]

Step 3: sudo docker image prune -a [for any dangling images, if present]

Step 4: df -h [to be sure, overlay data is removed].

Answer 10

Docker garbage collection can be done in an easy way using another docker container https://github.com/spotify/docker-gc

You could make it run as a cron using https://github.com/flaccid/docker-docker-gc-crond

Answer 11

Here is a working option:

docker rm -f $(docker ps -a |awk 'NR>1&&/Exited/{print $1}')

Answer 12

here is resolution to clean docker overlay directory from https://lebkowski.name/docker-volumes/

docker images --no-trunc | grep '<none>' | awk '{ print $3 }' | xargs -r docker rmi

docker ps --filter status=dead --filter status=exited -aq | xargs docker rm -v

for Docker < 1.9 :

find '/var/lib/docker/volumes/' -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d | grep -vFf <(docker ps -aq | xargs docker inspect | jq -r '.[]|.Mounts|.[]|.Name|select(.)')

Or for Docker >=1.9 :

docker volume ls -qf dangling=true | xargs -r docker volume rm