Can’t delete image with children

Question

I am trying

docker rmi c565603bc87f

Error:

Error response from daemon: conflict: unable to delete c565603bc87f (cannot be forced) - image has dependent child images

So i can't delete image even with -f flag. How to delete image then and all of its children ?

Linux and docker version:

uname -a Linux goracio-pc 4.4.0-24-generic #43-Ubuntu SMP Wed Jun 8 19:27:37 UTC 2016 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

docker version Client: Version: 1.11.2 API version: 1.23 Go version: go1.5.4 Git commit: b9f10c9 Built: Wed Jun 1 22:00:43 2016 OS/Arch: linux/amd64

Server: Version: 1.11.2 API version: 1.23 Go version: go1.5.4 Git commit: b9f10c9 Built: Wed Jun 1 22:00:43 2016 OS/Arch: linux/amd64

Answer 1

I had this issue and none of the short answers here worked, even in the page mentioned by @tudor above. I thought I would share here how I got rid of the images. I came up with the idea that dependent images must be >= the size of the parent image, which helps identify it so we can remove it.

I listed the images in size order to see if I could spot any correlations:

docker images --format '{{.Size}}\t{{.Repository}}\t{{.Tag}}\t{{.ID}}' | sort -h -r | column -t

What this does, is use some special formatting from docker to position the image size column first, then run a human readable sort in reverse order. Then I restore the easy-to-read columns.

Then I looked at the <none> containers, and matched the first one in the list with a similar size. I performed a simple docker rmi <image:tag> on that image and all the <none> child images went with it.

The problem image with all the child images was actually the damn myrepo/getstarted-lab image I used when I first started playing with docker. It was because I had created a new image from the first test image which created the chain.

Hopefully that helps someone else at some point.

Answer 2

When i want to remove some unused image with name "<none>" in docker i face with the problem unable to delete a354bbc7c9b7 (cannot be forced) - image has dependent child images.So for solving this problem:

sudo docker ps -a

CONTAINER ID        IMAGE                       COMMAND                  CREATED             STATUS                         PORTS                                              NAMES
01ee1276bbe0        lizard:1                    "/bin/sh -c 'java ..."   About an hour ago   Exited (1) About an hour ago                                                      objective_lewin
49d73d8fb023        javaapp:latest              "/usr/bin/java -ja..."   19 hours ago        Up 19 hours                    0.0.0.0:8091->8091/tcp                             pedantic_bell
405fd452c788        javaapp:latest              "/usr/bin/java -ja..."   19 hours ago        Created                                                                           infallible_varahamihira
532257a8b705        javaapp:latest              "/usr/bin/java -ja..."   19 hours ago        Created                                                                           demo-default
9807158b3fd5        javaapp:latest              "/usr/bin/java -ja..."   19 hours ago        Created                                                                           xenodochial_kilby
474930241afa        jenkins                     "/bin/tini -- /usr..."   13 days ago         Up 4 days                      0.0.0.0:8080->8080/tcp, 0.0.0.0:50000->50000/tcp   myjenkins
563d8c34682f        mysql/mysql-server:latest   "/entrypoint.sh my..."   3 weeks ago         Up 4 days (healthy)            0.0.0.0:3306->3306/tcp, 33060/tcp                  mymysql
b4ca73d45d20        phpmyadmin/phpmyadmin       "/run.sh phpmyadmin"     4 weeks ago         Exited (0) 3 weeks ago                                                            phpmyadmin

you can see that i have several Images with name javaapp:latest and different container name. So, i killed and remove all container of "javaapp:latest" container with:

sudo docker stop "containerName"

sudo docker rm "containrName"

Then

sudo docker rmi -f "imageId"

So i can remove all the images with name "<none>"

goodluck

Answer 3

You should try to remove unnecessary images before removing the image:

docker rmi $(sudo docker images --filter "dangling=true" -q --no-trunc)

After that:

docker rmi c565603bc87f