I have some automated processes that spew a bunch of Docker images tagged with meaningful labels. The labels follow a structured pattern.
Is there a way to find and delete images by tag? So assume I have images:
REPOSITORY TAG
junk/root stuff_687805
junk/root stuff_384962
Ideally I'd like to be able to do: docker rmi -tag stuff_*
Any good way to simulate that?
Fun with bash:
docker rmi $(docker images | grep stuff_ | tr -s ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f 3)
Using only docker filtering:
docker rmi $(docker images --filter=reference="*:stuff_*" -q)
reference="*:stuff_*"
filter allows you to filter images using a wildcard;
-q
option is for displaying only image IDs.
You can also acomplish it using grep + args + xargs:
docker images | grep "stuff_" | awk '{print $1 ":" $2}' | xargs docker rmi
- docker images lists all the images
- grep selects the lines based on the search for "_stuff"
- awk will print the first and second arguments of those lines (the image name and tag name) with a colon in between
- xargs will run the command 'docker rmi' using every line returned by awk as it's argument
Note: be careful with the grep search, as it could also match on something besides the tag, so best do a dry run first:
docker images | grep "stuff_" | awk '{print $1 ":" $2}' | xargs -n1 echo
- xargs -n1 the -n1 flags means xargs will not group the lines returned by awk together, but echo them out one at a time (for better readability)
Docker provides some filtering which you can use with labels, but I don't see wildcard support.
docker images -f "label=mylabel=myvalue"
Furthermore to add labels to an image you must add the information to the Dockerfile
with a LABEL
command. I couldn't find a way to add labels to an image unless you changed the Dockerfile
(i.e. couldn't find a commandline option), though you can add them to containers at runtime with --label
and --label-file
(run docs).
docker rmi $(docker images | grep stuff | tr -s ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f 3)
I would use the image id to remove the images, the tag being '1.2.3':
docker rmi $(docker images | awk '$2~/1.2.3/{print $3}')