Docker is very popular container technology. Docker is supported by Linux distributions and Windows operating systems. While using containers we may need to remove all container images from docker engine. We will look different ways to remove all docker container images in this tutorial.

List Docker Images

Before removing images we generally need to list existing images to be sure. This is a safety step to prevent catastrophic actions like checking before dd command. We will use sudo docker images . We use sudo  because we need  root privileges or be in docker user group.

$ sudo docker images

Delete All Containers

Containers are instances created from the images. We can delete these instances or container images. We will use docker ps  command to list them and provide their UID to the docker rm  command which will delete given container.

$ sudo docker rm $(sudo docker ps -a -q)

As we can see that deleted container UID is printed to the terminal output.

Delete All Images

Images are pure data about the starting point of the containers. We generally download images from docker hub or create them and store for daily usage. If we do not need them we can delete then with docker rmi  command but we should provide images UID with the docker images command like below.

$ sudo docker rmi -f $(sudo docker images -q)

Delete All Images Forcibly with Attached Volumes

If there are some issues while deleting docker images and volumes we may need to force them for removal. We will use -f option to for remove all docker images and containers. We will also use -v option for verbosity in conjunction with -f .

$ sudo docker rm -vf $(sudo docker ps -a -q)

Delete All Unused Images and Volumes

Docker engine is an intellygent mechanism where is monitors image and volume usage. Most of the cases there will be unused images and volumes where they take storage. We can use system prune to remove unused images and volumes. We can also put this command into cron to made it automatic.

$ sudo docker system prune --all