docker rmi cannot remove images, with: no such id

Question

I have a lot of images. When I try to remove them with docker rmi

$ sudo docker rmi acd33a9490dc
Error response from daemon: No such id: 75ce1f6710b         


        

Answer 1

I think this is the expected behavior, not a bug. This is because you have containers hanging around that have not been deleted. These containers are instances of the image, and that is preventing you from dropping that image.

Step 1 - remove unused container instances

Both jripoll's answer and Andras Hatvani's answer show ways of listing and removing the containers that are bound to the images.

Note that the latter will delete all container instances!! So, if there is one that you need to commit as a new image, you should do that first.

Step 2 - remove unnecessary images

After the containers have been deleted, you will be able to remove any images they were based on.

To quickly remove any untagged containers (ones that show up as when you run sudo docker images) you can run the following command:

    sudo docker images -q --filter "dangling=true" | sudo xargs docker rmi

I have saved that in /usr/local/bin/docker-purge-dangling so I can run it without needing to remember the command.