Creating a lifecycle policy
A lifecycle policy provides a way for you to create a set of rules that expire unused repository images. The following procedure shows you how to create a lifecycle policy. You should expect that after creating a lifecycle policy, the affected images are expired within 24 hours.
Important
It is considered best practice to create a lifecycle policy preview to ensure that the images affected by your lifecycle policy rules are what you intend. For more information, see Creating a lifecycle policy preview.
To create a lifecycle policy using the console
Open the Amazon ECR console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ecr/repositories
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From the navigation bar, choose the Region that contains the repository for which to create a lifecycle policy.
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In the navigation pane, under Private registry, choose Repositories.
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On the Private repositories page, select a repository and that use the Actions drop down to choose Lifecycle policies.
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On the lifecycle policy rules page for the repository, choose Create rule.
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Enter the following details for your lifecycle policy rule.
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For Rule priority, type a number for the rule priority. The rule priority determines in what order the lifecycle policy rules are applied.
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For Rule description, type a description for the lifecycle policy rule.
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For Image status, choose Tagged (wildcard matching), Tagged (prefix matching), Untagged, or Any.
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If you chose Tagged (wildcard matching) for Image status, then for Specify tags for wildcard matching, you can specify a list of image tags with a wildcard (*) on which to take action with your lifecycle policy. For example, if your images are tagged as
prod
,prod1
,prod2
, and so on, you would specifyprod*
to take action on all of them. If you specify multiple tags, only the images with all specified tags are selected.Important
There is a maximum limit of four wildcards (
*
) per string. For example,["*test*1*2*3", "test*1*2*3*"]
is valid but["test*1*2*3*4*5*6"]
is invalid. -
If you chose Tagged (prefix matching)for Image status, then for Specify tags for prefix matching, you can specify a list of image tags on which to take action with your lifecycle policy.
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For Match criteria, choose either Since image pushed or Image count more than and then specify a value.
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Choose Save.
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Create additional lifecycle policy rules by repeating steps 5–7.
To create a lifecycle policy using the AWS CLI
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Obtain the name of the repository for which to create the lifecycle policy.
aws ecr describe-repositories
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Create a local file named
policy.json
with the contents of the lifecycle policy. For lifecycle policy examples, see Examples of lifecycle policies. -
Create a lifecycle policy by specifying the repository name and reference the lifecycle policy JSON file you created.
aws ecr put-lifecycle-policy \ --repository-name
repository-name
\ --lifecycle-policy-text file://policy.json