The contents of the /var/lib/docker
directory vary depending on the driver Docker is using for storage.
By default this will be aufs
but can fall back to overlay
, overlay2
, btrfs
, devicemapper
or zfs
depending on your kernel support. In most places this will be aufs
but the RedHats went with devicemapper
.
You can manually set the storage driver with the -s
or --storage-driver=
option to the Docker daemon.
/var/lib/docker/{driver-name}
will contain the driver specific storage for contents of the images./var/lib/docker/graph/<id>
now only contains metadata about the image, in thejson
andlayersize
files.
In the case of aufs
:
/var/lib/docker/aufs/diff/<id>
has the file contents of the images./var/lib/docker/repositories-aufs
is a JSON file containing local image information. This can be viewed with the commanddocker images
.
In the case of devicemapper
:
/var/lib/docker/devicemapper/devicemapper/data
stores the images/var/lib/docker/devicemapper/devicemapper/metadata
the metadata- Note these files are thin provisioned "sparse" files so aren't as big as they seem.