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Free up space in the registry
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Free up space in the registry

With Garbage Collection you can free up space in the Container Registry. The service collects unused data that can be deleted:

  • layers of images to which no manifesto refers;
  • images without tags, which appear after images update.

Layers of images⁠

The container image is described in the manifest, which contains a description of the image layers.

Each layer contains changes to the image relative to the previous layer. The last layer combines all layers and is the current version of the image. For more information about layers, see the Image Format Specification article.

An example of describing layers in a manifest:

"layers": [
  {
    "mediaType": "application/vnd.docker.image.tar.gzip",
    "size": 48394,
    "digest": "sha256:b6bc5667d566e6c6"
  },
  {
    "mediaType": "application/vnd.docker.image.tar.gzip",
    "size": 17453,
    "digest": "sha256:1205abcd5b522e6b"
  },
  {
    "mediaType": "application/vnd.docker.image.tar.gzip",
    "size": 35279,
    "digest": "sha256:fa46023e1248d8676"
  }
]

A single layer can be used by multiple manifests. Garbage Collection collects layers that are not referenced by any manifest — such layers do not use images and can be safely deleted.

Start Garbage Collection⁠

To remove unused data in the registry, you need to manually run Garbage Collection.

For your information

During the data removal (registry cleanup) process, you can download images, but you cannot download new images — the layers of the downloaded image may be deleted and this will cause an error in the image.

  1. In the Control Panel, go to Cloud Platform → Container Registry.
  2. Open the Registries tab.
  3. The registry page will show the amount of unused data in this registry. Click Clear.
  4. Optional: check the Images without tags checkbox to delete them additionally. By default, only unused image layers are deleted.
  5. Click Clear.