What the Heck Is Docker Housekeeping? 🤷🏾‍♂️

Performance issues in your docker environment are more common if you are a Developer, DevOps engineer or SRE managing docker environments. You might wonder if you're a good enough engineer at times because of this performance bottleneck (maxing cpu, memory, or storage).

What is Docker Housekeeping?

The process of managing and maintaining Docker resources to guarantee effective and optimal use of system resources is referred to as "docker housekeeping." This includes removing any no longer required containers, images, volumes and networks. Housekeeping is important to prevent resource exhaustion and improve overall system performance.

Here are some basic housekeeping tasks you can perform in Docker:

• Remove unused containers: Use the docker container prune command to remove all stopped containers.

• Remove unused images: Use the docker image prune command to remove all dangling images.

• Remove unused volumes: Use the docker volume prune command to remove all unused volumes.

• Remove unused networks: Use the docker network prune command to remove all unused networks.

• Remove unused containers, images, volumes, and networks: Use the docker system prune command to remove all unused containers, images, volumes, and networks.

You can also use various options and filters with these commands to remove specific resources or prune them based on various criteria.

Here's an example command that will remove all Docker images that are older than 30 days using the docker image prune command with the --filter option to specify the date range.

It's a good practice to schedule housekeeping tasks periodically using tools like cron jobs or scheduling software to automate the process and ensure that the system stays optimized over time.

Thank you for reading, your comments are appreciated 🙏