Permanently delete a container in Docker
Normally, Docker does not delete stopped containers, it only unmarks them. This process occurs to avoid accidental deletion of stopped containers.
This article will discuss how to properly remove unused and untagged containers to reclaim resources in Docker.
Permanently delete a container in Docker
In Docker, we have remove command to forcefully remove a particular image. This command is for images docker rmi -f <image_id>and for containers docker rm <container_id>.
However, in theory, this command does not delete the container image, but only soft-deletes it by unmarking the object.
If we docker image ls -ainspect our stopped images using the command , we can verify that the above command only unmarks our images instead of deleting them.
Sample output:
Untagged: my_image:latest
The following sections will discuss multiple scripts and parameters that will help us to permanently delete docker containers.
Pruning containers in Docker
When using Docker, we can quickly accumulate many unused objects that can take up a lot of disk space and clutter the output generated by Docker commands. Unfortunately, Docker does not remove untagged and unused objects such as containers, images, volumes, and networks unless we explicitly tell it to do so.
We can quickly reclaim resources by deleting stopped containers and pruning containers. For example, we can use the following command.
Sample code:
docker system prune -a
The -a flag will remove all unused images. After running it, we will be prompted with the following message.
We can bypass this message by adding the above command with the -f force flag.
WARNING! This command will remove the following:
- all containers with the stopped status
- all network paths not used by at least one (1) container
- all images without at least one (1) container associated with them
- all cache
Are you sure you want to continue? [y/N]
Additionally, the above command will not remove unused volumes attached to previously unused Docker containers. However, we can attach and use the --volumes parameter to include removal of unused volumes.
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