How do I identify which container owns which overlay directory?

Question

My /var/lib/docker/overlay directory contains data for my containers but the directory names are all hashed. How can I determine which container owns which overlay?

Answer 1

You can use jq like so:

 docker inspect $(docker ps -qa) |  jq -r 'map([.Name, .GraphDriver.Data.MergedDir]) | .[] | "\(.[0])\t\(.[1])"'

Which gives:

/traefik_traefik_1      /var/lib/docker/overlay/58df937e805ec0496bd09686394db421c129e975f67180e737d5af51751af49c/merged
/gitlab-runner  /var/lib/docker/overlay/4e5b06f4ee09c60e2dad3a0ce87352cead086eb8229775f6839a477b46dce565/merged
/rancher-agent  /var/lib/docker/overlay/6026bb65dd9a83c2088a05cff005a1dd824494222445bab46b7329dc331465aa/merged

---

Explanation:

docker inspect $(docker ps -qa)

Display full docker details.

jq -r

Parse json and output regular strings:

map([.Name, .GraphDriver.Data.MergedDir])

For each element in the original array, find the Name and the overlay MergedDir .

"\(.[0])\t\(.[1])"

Output the first two elements of the array.

Answer 2

Thanks to @Matthew for his solution. It made me think of a Docker-only solution (without jq):

docker inspect -f $'{{.Name}}\t{{.GraphDriver.Data.MergedDir}}' $(docker ps -aq)

You can also ask for a specific container using

docker inspect -f $'{{.Name}}\t{{.GraphDriver.Data.MergedDir}}' <container_name>

Explanations

I use the -f option of Docker inspect that allows me to use a Go template to format the output of docker inspect .

I use $'' in Bash to allow special chars like \\t in my format.

Answer 3

docker ps -qa | xargs -I{} bash -c "docker inspect {} | grep <hash> && echo {}"

which would give you, for example,

    "LowerDir": "...<hash>...",
    "MergedDir": "...<hash>...",
    "UpperDir": "...<hash>...",
    "WorkDir": "...<hash>..."
24f8ab7ae838

Now you can tell the container 24f8ab7ae838 owns the overlay <hash> .