The GCR Garbage Collector

Tool for cleaning up images on the Google Container Registry. Initially based on the gist by Ahmet Alp Balkan, and rewritten in Go.

• Remove images older than the date specified with option -date
• Keep images within a given retention period -retention-period
• Clean up multiple image repositories at once with option -all
• Exclude some image repositories with option -exclude-repository
• Exclude images with certain tag(s) from deletion with option -exclude-tag
• Exclude images with tags matching a regexp pattern with option -exclude-tag-pattern
• Exclude images with tags matching a SemVer pattern with option -exclude-semver-tags

  Note: The SemVer standard does not include the v or V prefix (e.g. v1.0.0), but as it is widely used, our Regexp will also match tags beginning with either v or V, so they will be excluded from deletion as well.

• Only remove untagged images with -untagged-only flag
• Dry-run mode with option -dry-run (don't actually delete images but get same output)

You need an authenticated local gcloud installation, and write access to a Google Container Registry.

You can use a service account as well by setting the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable. Read the Google documentation for more details.

1. Download your desired version
2. Extract it

tar xvf gcrgc_0.3.2_linux_amd64.tar.gz

3. Move binary to desired destination

mv gcrgc /usr/local/bin

go get github.com/graillus/gcrgc
cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/graillus/gcrgc
go build -o bin/gcrgc cmd/gcrgc/gcrgc.go

A public image repository is available on DockerHub

docker pull graillus/gcrgc

Run with Google service account credentials:

docker run -t --rm \
  -v /path/to/serviceaccount.json:/credentials \
  -e GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS=/credentials/serviceaccount.json
  graillus/gcrgc ...

Clean up untagged images under the gcr.io/project-id/my-image repository.

gcrgc -registry=gcr.io/project-id -untagged-only my-image

Clean up tagged and untagged images under the gcr.io/project-id/my-image repository older than 2019-01-01, excluding tags master and latest

gcrgc -registry=gcr.io/project-id -date=2019-01-01 -exclude-tag=latest -exclude-tag=master my-image

Clean up images older than 30 days

gcrgc -registry=gcr.io/project-id -retention-period 30d

Clean up tagged and untagged images under the gcr.io/project-id/my-image excluding SemVer tags and latest

gcrgc -registry=gcr.io/project-id -exclude-tag=latest -exclude-semver-tags my-image

Clean up tagged and untagged images under the entire registry gcr.io/project-id older than 2019-01-01, excluding the images under gcr.io/project-id/my-image

gcrgc -registry=gcr.io/project-id -all -date=2019-01-01 -exclude-repository=my-image

A Helm chart is available if you wish to run it on a Kubernetes cluster (as a CronJob).

Check the documentation