GitLab Container Registry is a convenient choice to store Docker images when using GitLab CI. When every pipeline produces a new Docker image tag, you might want to clean up these image tags periodically. By default GitLab only offers a simplified Cleanup policy, which relies on regular expressions to clean up old image tags. But this approach does not take into account which image tags were recently deployed to your environments.

In this blogpost we outline an alternative image tag cleanup mechanism. We query the GitLab API to see which image tags were recently deployed to our environments, and retain these image tags in case we want to rollback.