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?
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
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.