How to check if a Docker image with a specific tag exist locally?

Try docker inspect, for example:

$ docker inspect --type=image treeder/hello.rb:nada
Error: No such image: treeder/hello.rb:nada
[]

But now with an image that exists, you'll get a bunch of information, eg:

$ docker inspect --type=image treeder/hello.rb:latest
[
{
    "Id": "85c5116a2835521de2c52f10ab5dda0ff002a4a12aa476c141aace9bc67f43ad",
    "Parent": "ecf63f5eb5e89e5974875da3998d72abc0d3d0e4ae2354887fffba037b356ad5",
    "Comment": "",
    "Created": "2015-09-23T22:06:38.86684783Z",
    ...
}
]

And it's in a nice json format.

tldr:

docker image inspect myimage:mytag

By way of demonstration...

success, found image:

$ docker image pull busybox:latest
latest: Pulling from library/busybox
Digest: sha256:32f093055929dbc23dec4d03e09dfe971f5973a9ca5cf059cbfb644c206aa83f
Status: Image is up to date for busybox:latest

$ docker image inspect busybox:latest >/dev/null 2>&1 && echo yes || echo no
yes

failure, missing image:

$ docker image rm busybox:latest
Untagged: busybox:latest
Untagged: busybox@sha256:32f093055929dbc23dec4d03e09dfe971f5973a9ca5cf059cbfb644c206aa83f

$ docker image inspect busybox:latest >/dev/null 2>&1 && echo yes || echo no
no

Reference:

https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/image_inspect/

I usually test the result of docker images -q (as in this script):

if [[ "$(docker images -q myimage:mytag 2> /dev/null)" == "" ]]; then
  # do something
fi

But since docker images only takes REPOSITORY as parameter, you would need to grep on tag, without using -q.

docker images takes tags now (docker 1.8+) [REPOSITORY[:TAG]]

The other approach mentioned below is to use docker inspect.
But with docker 17+, the syntax for images is: docker image inspect (on an non-existent image, the exit status will be non-0)

As noted by iTayb in the comments:

• The docker images -q method can get really slow on a machine with lots of images. It takes 44s to run on a 6,500 images machine.
• The docker image inspect returns immediately.

---

As noted in the comments by Henry Blyth:

If you use docker image inspect my_image:my_tag, and you want to ignore the output, you can add --format="ignore me" and it will print that literally.

You can also redirect stdout by adding >/dev/null but, if you can't do that in your script, then the format option works cleanly.