Get the size of a Docker image before a pull?

Question

How does one get the size of a Docker image before they pull it to their machine?

Lawrenson

duplicate of unix.stackexchange.com/questions/134186/…? – Stomato

As of Dec 2017, docker still doesn't provide any API (any that i know). However, you can try manually searching for image on Docker Hub and then navigating to the 'tag' tab for that image. It will show you the total size of image (still won't show layer info). E.g. info for Ubuntu – Emolument

Answer 1

When you search for a docker image on Docker hub, there will be 2 tabs- Repo Info and Tags. Open Tags tab and you will see the sizes of all the types of images you can pull for that image.

Solve

This does not answer the question. 1. Images may be hosted in many other places different than Docker Hub. 2. The size presented there is compressed one. 3. This is not an universal API-based approach. – Colleen

what is the uncompressed image size? only the compressed image size is available. – Wongawonga

Answer 2

1. For image on Docker Hub:

curl -s -H "Authorization: JWT " "https://hub.docker.com/v2/repositories/library/<image-name>/tags/?page_size=100" | jq -r '.results[] | select(.name == "<tag-name>") | .images[0].size' | numfmt --to=iec-i

2. For images on other registry like Microsoft Container Registry

   • Push the image to Docker Hub and you can get the compressed size of the image on Docker Hub website.

   • Use docker save to save image to a .tar file and then compress it a .tar.gz file.

docker save my-image:latest > my-image.tar

# Compress the .tar file
gzip my-image.tar

# Check the size of the compressed image
ls -lh my-image.tar.gz

3. To manually view the manifest data

Use docker manifest inspect to observe the manifest data, which shows you the compressed size of the image.

• You need to first enable it by editing ~/.docker/config.json file and set experimental to enable. Example: { "experimental": "enabled" }. More info at official docs.

• Issue docker manifest inspect -v <registry-domain>/<image-name> and see add the size for the layers but only for your specific architecture (e.g. amd64).

docker manifest inspect -v <registry-domain>/<image-name> | grep size | awk -F ':' '{sum+=$NF} END {print sum}' | numfmt --to=iec-i

Noted:

1. It's the compressed size of the layers, not their on-disk size on your server.
2. If the image is a multi-arch image (e.g. alpine linux contains arm, amd64 and several architectures), then you'll get the total of those while in actual usage docker only uses the relevant arch.

Brout

docker inspect worked, except for the number formatting. I got numfmt: invalid suffix in input: ‘4.37477e+09’ Piped output to printf to get around numfmt error. Also you could add --insecure if checking an insecure registry. docker manifest inspect -v [--insecure] <registry-domain>/<image_name> | grep size | awk -F ':' '{sum+=$NF} END {print sum}' | xargs printf "%f\n" | numfmt --to=iec-i – Mast

You can also pipe directly to .tar.gz: docker save my-image:latest | gzip > test.tar.gz and check size with du -h test.tar.gz – Iceland

Answer 3

Docker Hub

Get the compressed size in bytes of an image specific tag.

# for an official image the namespace is called library
curl -s https://hub.docker.com/v2/repositories/library/alpine/tags | \
    jq '.results[] | select(.name=="latest") | .full_size'

# 2796860

# here the project namespace is used
curl -s https://hub.docker.com/v2/repositories/jupyter/base-notebook/tags | \
    jq '.results[] | select(.name=="latest") | .full_size'

# 187647701

Get the compressed size in bytes of an image tag for a specific architecture / os.

# selecting an architecture
curl -s https://hub.docker.com/v2/repositories/library/alpine/tags | \
    jq '.results[] | select(.name=="latest") | .images[] | select (.architecture=="amd64") | .size'

# 2796860

# selecting an architecture and a specific os
curl -s https://hub.docker.com/v2/repositories/library/hello-world/tags | \                                                                                         
    jq '.results[] | select(.name=="latest") | .images[] | select (.architecture=="amd64" and .os=="linux") | .size'

# 2529

Alternative

An alternative is to use the experimental docker manifest inspect command. The advantage is that it does not rely on Docker Hub, it works as well with other registries because it's based on the Image Manifest specification.

# activate experimental mode
export DOCKER_CLI_EXPERIMENTAL=enabled 

docker manifest inspect -v alpine:latest | \
    jq '.[] | select(.Descriptor.platform.architecture=="amd64") | .SchemaV2Manifest.layers[].size'

# 2796860

# need to sum if multiple layers
docker manifest inspect jupyter/base-notebook:latest | \
    jq '[.layers[].size] | add'

# 187647701

Garrote

Answer 4

Getting compressed image size before pull for any registry that serves Image Manifest V2:

• Uses docker manifest inspect (available by default in recent Docker versions)
• Parses and sums layer sizes from the manifest using jq
• Formats sizes to iec standard using numfmt (not si, sizes in manifests are 1024-based)
• Supports multi-arch manifests

$ dockersize() { docker manifest inspect -v "$1" | jq -c 'if type == "array" then .[] else . end' |  jq -r '[ ( .Descriptor.platform | [ .os, .architecture, .variant, ."os.version" ] | del(..|nulls) | join("/") ), ( [ .SchemaV2Manifest.layers[].size ] | add ) ] | join(" ")' | numfmt --to iec --format '%.2f' --field 2 | sort | column -t ; }

$ dockersize mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/core/samples:dotnetapp-buster-slim
linux/amd64  72.96M

$ dockersize ghcr.io/ddelange/pycuda/runtime:3.9-master
linux/amd64  1.84G
linux/arm64  1.80G

$ dockersize python
linux/amd64                    334.98M
linux/arm/v5                   308.21M
linux/arm/v7                   295.69M
linux/arm64/v8                 326.32M
linux/386                      339.74M
linux/mips64le                 314.88M
linux/ppc64le                  343.86M
linux/s390x                    309.52M
windows/amd64/10.0.20348.825   2.20G
windows/amd64/10.0.17763.3165  2.54G

• For Debian users: apt-get install jq
• For Mac users: brew install coreutils jq (coreutils ships numfmt)

Lieberman

Thanks! Works great for many images, but fails for some, e.g.: dockersize rhub/r-minimal:latest fails with jq: error (at <stdin>:1): Cannot iterate over null (null). – Acetylcholine

Answer 5

You can simply get all information about the image by the docker hub http api like that :

https://hub.docker.com/v2/repositories/library/<image_name>/tags/

for example this url https://hub.docker.com/v2/repositories/library/couchdb/tags/latest return all information about the latest couchdb image

{
  "creator": 2215,
  "id": 2110662,
  "images": [
    {
      "architecture": "amd64",
      "features": "",
      "variant": null,
      "digest": "sha256:12c59b7f8b202476487c670ba7a042b3a654cd91302335df1bfdff0197f92968",
      "os": "linux",
      "os_features": "",
      "os_version": null,
      "size": 87486230,
      "status": "active",
      "last_pulled": "2022-07-25T17:18:08.778757Z",
      "last_pushed": "2022-07-12T15:29:34.553194Z"
    },
    {
      "architecture": "arm64",
      "features": "",
      "variant": "v8",
      "digest": "sha256:5985d1edef0613a93f2d7349a7cac2296ec956674df1f96d70d4eb23e83e6f80",
      "os": "linux",
      "os_features": "",
      "os_version": null,
      "size": 85620381,
      "status": "active",
      "last_pulled": "2022-07-25T15:30:42.25162Z",
      "last_pushed": "2022-07-12T03:05:55.128925Z"
    },
    {
      "architecture": "ppc64le",
      "features": "",
      "variant": null,
      "digest": "sha256:f667d0d4bf4acaeade0cf8510a4a1384ccd66c08e4ab0b678afb7f8651b9df41",
      "os": "linux",
      "os_features": "",
      "os_version": null,
      "size": 93209105,
      "status": "active",
      "last_pulled": "2022-07-25T12:28:16.460623Z",
      "last_pushed": "2022-07-12T05:26:46.295412Z"
    }
  ],
  "last_updated": "2022-07-12T15:30:03.436304Z",
  "last_updater": 1156886,
  "last_updater_username": "doijanky",
  "name": "latest",
  "repository": 545837,
  "full_size": 87486230,
  "v2": true,
  "tag_status": "active",
  "tag_last_pulled": "2022-07-25T17:18:08.778757Z",
  "tag_last_pushed": "2022-07-12T15:30:03.436304Z"
}

the image size (in byet) is : 87486230

if you need only the full size you can get it fetch the json and extract the property full_size by any json processor like jq or other

for example :

curl -s https://hub.docker.com/v2/repositories/library/couchdb/tags/latest | jq 'select(.name=="latest") | .full_size'
//87486230

Dukes

Answer 6

If you really look into the docker code for pull operation, I think your answer is there. If the image of the container is not cached, then during pulling of the image, docker first collects the information about the image from the registry like number of layers, size of each layers etc. etc.

I would refer to read this file.

https://github.com/moxiegirl/docker/blob/master/distribution/xfer/download.go

Festival