Many of us are using Sonatype Nexus Repository to publish Docker images. Typically, we build images tagged with the commit hash (or using semver ideally) after source control management (SCM) change automatically in continuous integration (CI), and we push them to registry. As a result, there are many "unneeded" and "old" images that in our case take significant amount of disk space.
Editor's Note: This article is a contribution from one of our community members, M. Labouardy. Please continue the discussion in the comments below.
I looked around the graphical interface of Sonatype Nexus Repository, and there's apparently nothing to remove several Docker images at the same time, or even a scheduled task to clean up old hosted Docker images, and to also clean up layers which are no longer used by any hosted images.
So, I have come up with a simple bash script which uses Docker Registry API to purge Docker images and keep the last X images and delete all other. But, is there a better solution? Yes. I built a Sonatype Nexus CLI.
To install Sonatype Nexus CLI, find the appropriate package for your system and download it.
For Linux:
wget https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/nexus-cli/1.0.0-beta/linux/nexus-cli
After downloading Sonatype Nexus CLI, add the execution permission to the binary:
chmod +x nexus-cli
Note: For Windows, make sure that nexus-cli binary is available on the PATH. This page contains instructions for setting the PATH on Windows.
After installing, verify the installation worked by opening a new terminal session and checking if nexus-cli is available.
Once done, configure the Sonatype Nexus Repository credentials:
Through nexus-cli configure, the Sonatype Nexus CLI will prompt you for four pieces of information. The username and password are your account credentials. Sonatype Nexus Repository hostname and Docker repository name.
That should be it. Try out the following command from your cmd prompt and, if you have any images, you should see them listed
nexus-cli image ls
Display image tags:
nexus-cli image tags -name IMAGE_NAME
Image description:
nexus-cli image info -name IMAGE_NAME -tag TAG
To remove a specific image:
nexus-cli image delete -name IMAGE_NAME -tag TAG
To keep only the last X images and delete all other:
nexus-cli image delete -name IMAGE_NAME -keep X
That's it ! Let's go back to Sonatype Nexus Repository dashboard:
As you can see, Sonatype Nexus Repository kept only the last four images and deleted the others.
The CLI is still in its early stages, so you are welcome to contribute to the project in GitHub.
