How can I fix 'No space left on device' error in Docker?

Question

I'm running a Mac-native Docker (no virtualbox/docker-machine).

I have a huge image with a lot of infrastructure in it (Postgres, etc.). I have run cleanup scripts to get rid of a lot of cruft--unused images and so forth.

When I run my image I get an error like:

could not create directory "/var/lib/postgresql/data/pg_xlog": No space left on device 

On my host Mac /var is sitting at 60% space available and generally my disk has lots of storage free.

Is this some Docker configuration I need to bump up to give it more resources?

Relevant lines from mount inside docker:

none on / type aufs (rw,relatime,si=5b19fc7476f7db86,dio,dirperm1) /dev/vda1 on /data type ext4 (rw,relatime,data=ordered) /dev/vda1 on /etc/resolv.conf type ext4 (rw,relatime,data=ordered) /dev/vda1 on /etc/hostname type ext4 (rw,relatime,data=ordered) /dev/vda1 on /etc/hosts type ext4 (rw,relatime,data=ordered) /dev/vda1 on /var/lib/postgresql/data type ext4 (rw,relatime,data=ordered) 

Here’s df:

[11:14]   Filesystem     1K-blocks    Used Available Use% Mounted on none           202054928 4333016 187269304   3% / tmpfs            1022788       0   1022788   0% /dev tmpfs            1022788       0   1022788   0% /sys/fs/cgroup /dev/vda1      202054928 4333016 187269304   3% /data shm                65536       4     65532   1% /dev/shm tmpfs             204560     284    204276   1% /run/docker.sock 

Answer 1

I haven't found many options for this, the main issue in github is https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/371

Some of the options suggested there are:

• If you can remove all images/containers, you can follow these instructions:

docker rm $(docker ps -a -q) docker rmi $(docker images -q) docker volume rm $(docker volume ls |awk '{print $2}') rm -rf ~/Library/Containers/com.docker.docker/Data/*

• You can try to prune all unused images/containers but this has proven not very effective:

docker system prune

• Use a template image that is larger, install qemu using homebrew and move the image around, see this specific comment: https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/371#issuecomment-242047368 but you need to have at least 2x of space left to do this without losing containers/images.

See also: How do you get around the size limitation of Docker.qcow2 in the Docker for Mac? And https://forums.docker.com/t/no-space-left-on-device-error/10894/26

Answer 2

I ran into the same issue, running docker system prune --volumes resolved the problem.

"Volumes are not pruned by default, and you must specify the --volumes flag for docker system prune to prune volumes."

See: https://docs.docker.com/config/pruning/#prune-everything