Docker is now an essential tool for software developers, as it allows you to spin up almost any infrastructure you may need.

Ordinarily, you would use a utility to manage your containers and images. This may be Docker Desktop or, on macOS, Orbstack.

With a large number of images (currently, I have about 90), you may be curious to know how much disk space your images and containers are using.

For the usage of the images themselves, Orbstack can help with this.

orbstackImageSize

For the containers themselves, there is no obvious way to get that information directly from OrbStack.

However, the Docker command-line tools can assist with this, using the Docker system df command

docker system df

This will print the following:

dockerSystemdf

The key information here is:

  1. Count, state, and disk usage of downloaded images
  2. Count, state, and disk usage of running containers
  3. Count, state, and disk usage of local volumes

As you can see, your images can consume quite a bit of disk space.

TLDR

The docker system df command prints information about your Docker images, containers, volumes, and disk usage.

Happy hacking!