What is docker image reference?

Question

Docker documentation mentions image reference in many places. However, running docker images command gives the list of images with the following properties: REPOSITORY, TAG, IMAGE ID, CREATED, SIZE - no reference. Is 'reference' a synonym for ID or digest, or something else?

Answer 1

The docker image reference is the combination of the REPOSITORY and TAG in this format REPOSITORY:TAG where they are both separated by :. So if you have an image with a REPOSITORY of IMAGE1 and a tag of latest the image reference would be IMAGE1:latest. The knowledge of an image reference would help you to filter by docker image list by reference by running:

docker images --filter=reference='myDocker*:*dev'

The above command will return all docker images that the repository name starts with myDocker and the tag name ends with dev.