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Vuyisile Ndlovu
Vuyisile Ndlovu

Posted on • Originally published at vuyisile.com on

Freeing up space used by docker containers.

When building or working with docker containers, you may get error messages like the one below relating to a lack of space:


failed to copy files: failed to copy directory: Error processing tar file(exit status 1): write /<directory>: no space left on device

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The error occurs because Docker objects accumulate over time and can eventually exhaust available storage. To resolve do the following:


docker system df

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This will tell you how much space Docker objects are taking up in your machine. Docker includes a prune command that allows you to reclaim space. You can use prune to delete all objects or some images. You can read more about it in the docs.


# Prune everything
docker system prune

# Only prune images
docker image prune

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This will hopefully clear up space. If this doesn’t work, you may need to allocate more disk space to docker.

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