[docker] Can’t delete docker image with dependent child images

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

find the image id and parent id for all image created after the image in question with the following:

docker inspect --format='{{.Id}} {{.Parent}}' $(docker images --filter since=<image_id> -q)

Then you call command:

docker rmi {sub_image_id} 

"sub_image_id" is ID of dependent image

What worked to me was to use the REPOSITORY:TAG combination rather than IMAGE ID.

When I tried to delete a docker image with the command docker rmi <IMAGE ID> with no containers associated with this image I had the message:

$ docker rmi 3f66bec2c6bf
Error response from daemon: conflict: unable to delete 3f66bec2c6bf (cannot be forced) - image has dependent child images

I could delete with success when I used the command docker rmi RPOSITORY:TAG

$ docker rmi ubuntu:18.04v1
Untagged: ubuntu:18.04v1

Suppose we have a Dockerfile

FROM ubuntu:trusty
CMD ping localhost

We build image from that without TAG or naming

docker build .

Now we have a success report "Successfully built 57ca5ce94d04" If we see the docker images

REPOSITORY          TAG                 IMAGE ID            CREATED             SIZE
<none>              <none>              57ca5ce94d04        18 seconds ago      188MB
ubuntu              trusty              8789038981bc        11 days ago         188MB

We need to first remove the docker rmi 57ca5ce94d04

Followed by

docker rmi 8789038981bc

By that image will be removed!

A forced removal of all as suggested by someone

docker rmi $(docker images -q) -f

THIS COMMAND REMOVES ALL IMAGES (USE WITH CAUTION)

Have you tried to use --force

sudo docker rmi $(sudo docker images -aq) --force

This above code run like a charm even doe i had the same issue

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

Force deleting a list of images (exclude version 10, for example)

docker images | grep version | grep -v version10 > images.txt && for img in $( awk -F" " '{print $3}' /root/images.txt ) ; do docker rmi -f $img; done

If you want to Untag Docker Images

docker rmi <rep:tag>

If you want to Removing Docker Images

docker image rm <image_id>

Ex: Type docker image ls to show info of Images

REPOSITORY          TAG                 IMAGE ID            CREATED             SIZE
python              3.6            60f85556d5d2        4 days ago          174MB

docker rmi python:3.6

docker image rm 60f85556d5d2

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.

Expanding on the answer provided by @Nguyen - this function can be added to your .bashrc etc and then called from the commandline to help clean up any image has dependent child images errors...

You can run the function as yourself, and if a docker ps fails, then it will run the docker command with sudo and prompt you for your password.

Does NOT delete images for any running containers!

docker_rmi_dependants ()                                                                                                                                                         
{ 
  DOCKER=docker
  [ docker ps >/dev/null 2>&1 ] || DOCKER="sudo docker"

  echo "Docker: ${DOCKER}"

  for n in $(${DOCKER} images | awk '$2 == "<none>" {print $3}');
  do  
    echo "ImageID: $n";
    ${DOCKER} inspect --format='{{.Id}} {{.Parent}}' $(${DOCKER} images --filter since=$n -q);
  done;

  ${DOCKER} rmi $(${DOCKER} images | awk '$2 == "<none>" {print $3}')
}

I also have this in my .bashrc file...

docker_rm_dangling ()  
{ 
  DOCKER=docker
  [ docker ps >/dev/null 2>&1 ] || DOCKER="sudo docker"

  echo "Docker: ${DOCKER}"

  ${DOCKER} images -f dangling=true 2>&1 > /dev/null && YES=$?;                                                                                                                  
  if [ $YES -eq 1 ]; then
    read -t 30 -p "Press ENTER to remove, or CTRL-C to quit.";
    ${DOCKER} rmi $(${DOCKER} images -f dangling=true -q);
  else
    echo "Nothing to do... all groovy!";
  fi  
}

Works with:

$ docker --version 
Docker version 17.05.0-ce, build 89658be

In some cases (like in my case) you may be trying to delete an image by specifying the image id that has multiple tags that you don't realize exist, some of which may be used by other images. In which case, you may not want to remove the image.

If you have a case of redundant tags as described here, instead of docker rmi <image_id> use docker rmi <repo:tag> on the redundant tag you wish to remove.

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

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

After that, run:

docker rmi c565603bc87f

Building on Simon Brady's brute force method here, if you don't have a ton of images you can use this shell function:

recursive_remove_image() {
  for image in $(docker images --quiet --filter "since=${1}")
  do
    if [ $(docker history --quiet ${image} | grep ${1}) ]
    then
      recursive_remove_image "${image}"
    fi
  done
  echo "Removing: ${1}"
  docker rmi -f ${1}
}

and then call it using recursive_remove_image <image-id>.

Image Layer: Repositories are often referred to as images or container images, but actually they are made up of one or more layers. Image layers in a repository are connected together in a parent-child relationship. Each image layer represents changes between itself and the parent layer.

The docker building pattern uses inheritance. It means the version i depends on version i-1. So, we must delete the version i+1 to be able to delete version i. This is a simple dependency.

If you wanna delete all images except the last one (the most updated) and the first (base) then we can export the last (the most updated one) using docker save command as below.

docker save -o <output_file> <your_image-id> | gzip <output_file>.tgz

Then, now, delete all the images using image-id as below.

docker rm -f <image-id i> | docker rm -f <image i-1> | docker rm -f <image-id i-2> ... <docker rm -f <image-id i-k> # where i-k = 1

Now, load your saved tgz image as below.

gzip -c <output_file.tgz> | docker load

see the image-id of your loaded image using docker ps -q. It doesn't have tag and name. You can simply update tag and name as done below.

docker tag <image_id> group_name/name:tag

Just simply use:

docker rmi <image:tag> -f

for example:

docker rmi ubuntu:latest -f 

will remove image name ubuntu with tag name latest and -f is for forcefully removal.

it worked for me

I also got this issue, I could resolve issue with below commands. this may be cause, the image's container is running or exit so before remove image you need to remove container

docker ps -a -f status=exited : this command shows all the exited containers so then copy container Id and then run below commands to remove container

docker rm #containerId : this command remove container this may be issue that mention "image has dependent child images"

Then try to remove image with below command

docker rmi #ImageId

# docker rm $(docker ps -aq)

After that use the command as Nguyen suggested.

The answer here is to find all descendent children, which has an answer here:

docker how can I get the list of dependent child images?

Then use that to remove the child images in order.

all previous answers are correct but here is one solution which is just deleteing all of your images forcefully (use this command at your own risk it will delete all of your images)

docker rmi $(docker images -q) -f

you can just do this:

? ~ sudo docker rmi 4ed13257bb55 -f Deleted: sha256:4ed13257bb5512b975b316ef482592482ca54018a7728ea1fc387e873a68c358 Deleted: sha256:4a478ca02e8d2336595dcbed9c4ce034cd15f01229733e7d93a83fbb3a9026d3 Deleted: sha256:96df41d1ce6065cf75d05873fb1f9ea9fed0ca86addcfcec7722200ed3484c69 Deleted: sha256:d95efe864c7096c38757b80fddad12819fffd68ac3cc73333ebffaa42385fded

Here's a script to remove an image and all the images that depend on it.

#!/bin/bash

if [[ $# -lt 1 ]]; then
    echo must supply image to remove;
    exit 1;
fi;

get_image_children ()
{
    ret=()
    for i in $(docker image ls -a --no-trunc -q); do
        #>&2 echo processing image "$i";
        #>&2 echo parent is $(docker image inspect --format '{{.Parent}}' "$i")
        if [[ "$(docker image inspect --format '{{.Parent}}' "$i")" == "$1" ]]; then
            ret+=("$i");
        fi;
    done;
    echo "${ret[@]}";
}

realid=$(docker image inspect --format '{{.Id}}' "$1")
if [[ -z "$realid" ]]; then
    echo "$1 is not a valid image.";
    exit 2;
fi;
images_to_remove=("$realid");
images_to_process=("$realid");
while [[ "${#images_to_process[@]}" -gt 0 ]]; do
    children_to_process=();
    for i in "${!images_to_process[@]}"; do
        children=$(get_image_children "${images_to_process[$i]}");
        if [[ ! -z "$children" ]]; then
            # allow word splitting on the children.
            children_to_process+=($children);
        fi;
    done;
    if [[ "${#children_to_process[@]}" -gt 0 ]]; then
        images_to_process=("${children_to_process[@]}");
        images_to_remove+=("${children_to_process[@]}");
    else
        #no images have any children. We're done creating the graph.
        break;
    fi;
done;
echo images_to_remove = "$(printf %s\n "${images_to_remove[@]}")";
indices=(${!images_to_remove[@]});
for ((i="${#indices[@]}" - 1; i >= 0; --i)) ; do
    image_to_remove="${images_to_remove[indices[i]]}"
    if [[ "${image_to_remove:0:7}" == "sha256:" ]]; then
        image_to_remove="${image_to_remove:7}";
    fi
    echo removing image "$image_to_remove";
    docker rmi "$image_to_remove";
done