Removing Docker containers and images

Playing with Docker can leave you with several stopped containers and unneeded, intermediary images. This may waste substantial disk space. This article shows how to efficiently remove such containers and images.

List all exited containers

docker ps -aq -f status=exited

Remove stopped containers

docker ps -aq --no-trunc -f status=exited | xargs docker rm

This command will not remove running containers, only an error message will be printed out for each of them.

Remove dangling/untagged images

docker images -q --filter dangling=true | xargs docker rmi

Remove containers created after a specific container

docker ps --since a1bz3768ez7g -q | xargs docker rm

Remove containers created before a specific container

docker ps --before a1bz3768ez7g -q | xargs docker rm

Use --rm for docker build

Use --rm together with docker build to remove intermediary images during the build process.