podman-system-prune(1) General Commands Manual podman-system-prune(1)

podman-system-prune - Remove all unused pods, containers, images, networks, and volume data

podman system prune [options]

podman system prune removes all unused containers (both dangling and unreferenced), pods, networks, and optionally, volumes from local storage.

Use the --all option to delete all unused images. Unused images are dangling images as well as any image that does not have any containers based on it.

By default, volumes are not removed to prevent important data from being deleted if there is currently no container using the volume. Use the --volumes flag when running the command to prune volumes as well.

--all, -a

Recursively remove all unused pods, containers, images, networks, and volume data. (Maximum 50 iterations.)

--external

Removes all leftover container storage files from local storage not managed by Podman. In normal circumstances, no such data exists, but in case of an unclean shutdown, the Podman database may be corrupted and cause this.

However, when using transient storage mode, the Podman database does not persist. This means containers leave the writable layers on disk after a reboot. When using a transient store, it is recommended that the podman system prune --external command is run during boot.

This option is incompatible with --all and --filter and drops the default behaviour of removing unused resources.

--filter=filters

Provide filter values.

The filters argument format is of key=value. If there is more than one filter, then pass multiple OPTIONS: --filter foo=bar --filter bif=baz.

Supported filters:

Filter Description
label Only remove containers and images, with (or without, in the case of label!=[...] is used) the specified labels.
until Only remove containers and images created before given timestamp.

The label filter accepts two formats. One is the label=key or label=key=value, which removes containers and images with the specified labels. The other format is the label!=key or label!=key=value, which removes containers and images without the specified labels.

The until filter can be Unix timestamps, date formatted timestamps, or Go duration strings (e.g. 10m, 1h30m) computed relative to the machine’s time.

--force, -f

Do not prompt for confirmation

--help, -h

Print usage statement

--volumes

Prune volumes currently unused by any container

podman(1), podman-system(1)

February 2019, Originally compiled by Dan Walsh (dwalsh at redhat dot com) December 2020, converted filter information from docs.docker.com documentation by Dan Walsh (dwalsh at redhat dot com)