How To Fix The Running Out Of Disk Space Error In

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How to fix the running out of disk space error in Docker?

Asked 6 years, 2 months ago

Viewed 135k times

When I am trying to build the docker image I am getting out of disk space error and after investigating I find the following:

df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/vda1        4G   3.8G     0 100% /

How do I fix this out of space error?

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edited Jul 10, 2018 at 8:27

asked Jul 9, 2018 at 5:46

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Pritam Banerjee

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There’s no error here, just the output of df -h. Also when you say “memory” you probably mean “disk space”?

– jannis

Commented Jul 9, 2018 at 7:41
2

Here solution: stackoverflow.com/questions/25713773

– T.Todua

Commented Jun 26, 2019 at 9:54

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12 Answers

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130

docker system prune [-a]

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

This will clean up all images, containers, networks, volumes not used. We generally try to clean up old images when creating a new one but you could also have this run as a scheduled task on your docker server every day.

Other answers address listing system memory usage and increasing the amount of Docker disk space in Docker Desktop:

The docker system df command can be used to view reclaimable memory –Abishek_Jain

Open up the docker settings -> Resources -> Advanced and up the amount of Hard Drive space it can use under disk image size. –Nico

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edited Dec 13, 2023 at 21:30

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rjurney

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answered Jul 9, 2018 at 9:55

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Nick Spicer

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You need to pass the --volumes flag to prune the volumes as well. Without this only ‘unused containers, networks, images (both dangling and unreferenced)’ will be pruned.

– jannis

Commented Jul 27, 2018 at 8:28
2

I feel that this is only a temporary solution. We have over 14Gb free disk space and Docker still says that no space is left. We called “docker system prune” and it worked, but only for a while. Not to mention that the database was deleted as well but thats our fault (always make regular backups people!)

– Ziga Petek

Commented Oct 4, 2019 at 7:07

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use command - docker system prune -a This will clean up total Reclaimable Sise for Images, Network & Volume….. This will remove all images related reclaimable space which are not associated with any running container…..

Run docker system df command to view Reclaimable memory

In case there is some Reclaimable memory then if above command does not work in first go then run the same command twice then it should cleaned up…. I have been experiencing this behaviour almost on daily basis….. Planning to report this bug to Docker Community but before that want to reproduce this bug with new release to see if this has been fixed or not with latest one….

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edited Nov 2, 2022 at 5:56

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tryingToLearn

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answered Nov 4, 2018 at 17:46

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Abhishek Jain

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Be very careful with -a. This will wipe every image on your system that doesn’t have a container associated with it. Usually just docker system prune is sufficient.

– Josh

Commented Nov 27, 2019 at 2:51
1

I did mention about user has to be careful when using -a as it will remove all images for which containers are not running….

– Abhishek Jain

Commented Nov 27, 2019 at 12:18
Be very careful with -a. This will also remove unused networks and you may lose network connectivity.

– Lawrence Patrick

Commented Dec 9, 2020 at 4:23
The statement “if above command does not work in first go then run the same command twice” helped me. Not sure, why it did not free up space in 1 shot.

– tryingToLearn

Commented Nov 2, 2022 at 5:58

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Open up the docker settings -> Resources -> Advanced and up the amount of Hard Drive space it can use under disk image size.

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answered Aug 4, 2020 at 14:23

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Nico

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Works great for me on docker desktop version 2.3.0.4 on Mac os Mojave.

– user674669

Commented Sep 15, 2020 at 21:26
9

Is there any way to do this on Linux?

– nCoder

Commented Oct 27, 2021 at 16:31
@nCoder docker does not run in a VM on (most) linux machines, so there is no artificial limitation on the amount of disk space it can use to begin with.

– DragonBobZ

Commented Dec 5, 2023 at 15:20
1

This should be top answer in combination with the original and second answer.

– rjurney

Commented Dec 13, 2023 at 21:25

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If you are using linux, then most probably docker is filling up the directory /var/lib/docker/containers, because it is writing container logs to <CONTAINER_ID>-json.log file under this directory. You can use the command cat /dev/null > <CONTAINER_ID>-json.log to clear this file or you can set the maximum log file size be editing /etc/sysconfig/docker. More information can be found in this RedHat documentation. In my case, I have created a crontab to clear the contents of the file every day at midnight. Hope this helps!

NB:

You can find the docker containers with ID using the following command sudo docker ps --no-trunc
You can check the size of the file using the command du -sh $(docker inspect --format='{{.LogPath}}' CONTAINER_ID_FOUND_IN_LAST_STEP)

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edited Jun 24, 2020 at 11:40

answered Jun 24, 2020 at 11:30

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kaushik

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Does Log files takes larger memory space?

– adnan

Commented Nov 8, 2023 at 10:06
1

@adnan, yes, it will takeup diskspace eventually

– kaushik

Commented Nov 8, 2023 at 11:27
Some linux distros it’s /var/lib/docker/overlay2

– Geordie

Commented Jan 27 at 21:20

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Nothing works for me. I change the disk images max size in Docker Settings, and just after that it free huge size.

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answered Oct 15, 2018 at 12:24

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troger19

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Wow, I didn’t see this option! Was wondering why my Windows showed 60GB free disk space, but Docker containers said “Not enough disk space left” - I had my limit at 50GB (which was all used up) - set it to 200 and it worked!

– Alex

Commented Jul 13, 2019 at 18:44
well the command should be as mentioned above, the thing is it doesnt work for me.. only manually clicking on a button

– troger19

Commented Apr 9, 2021 at 9:33

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Not sure if this is still relevant, but in case of docker system prune not working, and if you don’t want to go docker system prune -a, you should pick and delete images using either

docker image prune --filter

Picking and deleting them from Docker for Dekstop

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edited May 1, 2023 at 13:36

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cconsta1

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answered Apr 27, 2023 at 17:51

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L0t

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Going to leave this here since I couldn’t find the answer.

Go to the Docker GUI -> Prefereces -> Reset -> Uninstall

Completely uninstall Docker.

Then install it fresh using this link

My docker was using 20GB of space when building an image, after fresh install, it uses 3-4GB max. Definitely helps!

Also, if you using a macbook, have look at ~/Library/Containers/docker*

This folder for me was 60 GB and was eating up all the space on my mac! Even though this may not be relevant to the question, I believe it is vital for me to leave this here.

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answered Oct 11, 2019 at 9:51

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DUDANF

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This actually helped me a lot, thanks. I didn’t have to reinstall, but finding where all the junk data that was not getting pruned was did the trick.

– Jim Crozier

Commented Feb 16 at 14:56

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There are at least two directories where docker can fill up space. Assuming you have a bigger disk partition on your computer, say /bigdisk, here are the possible solution:

Temp dir in /var/tmp: docker will honour the TMPDIR settings

mkdir -p /bigdisk/bigtmp
chmod 1777 /bigdisk/bigtmp
export TMPDIR=/bigdisk/bigtmp

/var/lib/containers (older version of docker might use /var/lib/docker). You can solve this by making /var/lib/containers to be a symlink to the bigger disk:

mkdir -p /bigdisk/var-lib/containers
ln -s /bigdisk/var-lib/containers /var/lib/containers

Now if you have already some docker images in /var/lib/containers, you need to move those first. First stop any docker daemon running

mkdir -p /bigdisk/var-lib/containers
##### copy existing container content to bigdisk
(cd /var/lib/containers; tar cvf - . ) | (cd /bigdisk/var-lib/containers; tar xvf - )
#### ensure the copy is good.
du -sh /var/lib/containers 
du -sh /bigdisk/var-lib/containers
rmdir /var/lib/containers
ln -s /bigdisk/var-lib/containers /var/lib/containers

Then run docker to verify things run as before

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answered May 1 at 6:47

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MonaPy

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I wanted to add this to my CI/CD pipeline so I won’t have to do it manually on my AWS EC2 instance.

The -f option ensured there was no prompt for confirmation

Without it, I kept getting: Are you sure you want to continue? [y/N] And my updates failed to deploy.

Here’s what worked for me: In my .yml file, :

deploy:
   steps:
      - name: Prune and free some space in images and containers
      run: docker system prune -f

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answered Feb 18 at 4:50

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ChelaTheGreat

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Unless you are using a logging driver other than the default json_file logging driver with its default unlimited max-size, your container logs may grow large and fill up either your host machine’s disk (Linux host machine) or your docker machine VM’s disk (macOS host machine and probably also Windows). This can be hard to inspect (ref: my question).

kaushik’s answer explains how to truncate the log files on Linux. On macOS though it’s more complicated because the log files are stored in the Docker Machine VM. See my answer here for full details.

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answered Feb 23 at 19:01

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