Limiting & clearing Docker container logs

By default there are no Docker does not rotate logs of the containers. This might cause disk space issues when there is something that is intensively logging.

Globally

You can set a limit in the /etc/docker/daemon.json file. Afterwards restart docker

{
  "log-driver": "json-file",
  "log-opts": {"max-size": "10m", "max-file": "3"}
}

Docker Compose

It is also possible to set this via the docker compose configuration.

version: '3'

services:
  my_service:
    logging:
      driver: "json-file"
      options:
        max-size: "5m"

Clearing logs manually

Running truncate -s 0 /var/lib/docker/containers/*/*-json.log will clear ALL logs.