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How to check the disk usage of all running Docker containers?

Posted on March 23, 2020

With the docker system df command you would get a summary of your Docker usage including things like:

  • The total size of all images
  • The total size of all containers
  • The local volumes size
  • And the cache

However, here’s how to check the size of each running container



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By default, if you run docker images you will get the size of each image. However, if you run docker ps you would not get the size of the running containers.

To check the size of each running container what you could do is just use the --size argument of docker ps command.

  1. docker ps --size

You would get the following output:

CONTAINER ID        IMAGE               COMMAND                  CREATED             STATUS              PORTS                NAMES               SIZE
d64a8112d00a        nginx               "nginx -g 'daemon of…"   About an hour ago   Up About an hour    0.0.0.0:80->80/tcp   nginx               12MB (virtual 127MB)
ab81be326c31        eboraas/laravel     "/usr/sbin/apache2ct…"   2 hours ago         Up 2 hours          80/tcp, 443/tcp      laravel             92MB (virtual 509MB)

That way you will be able to quickly tell which container exactly is consuming the most disk space.

In case that you need to clear some space, I would recommend checking out this tutorial here on how to remove Docker Images, Containers and Volumes:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-remove-docker-images-containers-and-volumes

Hope that this helps!

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