28: No space left on device error

Question

I was trying to renew my SSL certificate on my droplet by following this guide: https://certbot.eff.org/lets-encrypt/ubuntubionic-nginx

But for some reason I kept getting 28: No space left on device when I run apt-get update. I tried to solve this by trying apt-get clean, which seemed to work for a little bit but then still had the same issue.

I tried to remove files under /tmp/ and /var/log/ and started getting this error: Couldn't create temporary file /tmp/apt.conf.vDUIgg for passing config to apt-key when I run apt-get update. When I tried to follow this (https://sillycodes.com/quick-tip-couldnt-create-temporary-file/) but keep getting the same error. I’m running out of ideas on how to troubleshoot this, please help :'(

Bobby · Accepted Answer

Hello, I would recommend starting with the following: First check how much space you have available and which partition is filling up with the following command: df -h The output would look something like this: Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on udev 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /dev tmpfs 395M 1.8M 393M 1% /run /dev/vda1 25G 20G 4.4G 82% / In my case I am using 20G out of 25GB available for my root partition. Basically the df command reports the file system disk space usage. Also if you have enough space, make sure to check your Inode usage: df -i Then depending on the partition which is filling up you could use the following command to find any files that are larger than 500MB for example: sudo find / -type f -size +500M -exec ls -lh {} \; The output should look something like: -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1.8G May 13 15:43 /home/user1/large-file.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1.8G May 13 15:42 /home/bobby/large-file.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1.8G May 13 15:43 /home/bobby/public_html/wp-content/core.dump -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1.8G May 13 15:42 /home/bobby/public_html/error_log Depending on the size of your disk, the command might take a while to complete. You can then go ahead and delete any of the large files that you do not need. If there are no large files maybe there are a lot of small files which are exhausting the available webspace, what you could do is use the du command which estimates the file space usage: du -h --max-depth=1 / For example: root@bobby:~$ cd /home/ root@bobby:/home$ du -h --max-depth=1 16K ./testuser 28K ./user 16K ./root 1.8G ./user2 5.0G ./bobby 7.1G . Then we can cd into the largest folder and run the command again: root@bobby:/home$ cd bobby/ root@bobby:/home/bobby$ du -h --max-depth=1 76K ./.npm 4.0K ./script 5.0G ./public_html 12K ./.ssh 5.0G . We would need to do that a few more times until we get to the folder that is using those 5GB: root@bobby:/home/bobby$ cd public_html/ root@bobby:/home/bobby/public_html$ du -h --max-depth=1 8.0K ./test 4.9G ./wp-content 4.0K ./wpcli.bobbyiliev.com 14M ./wp-includes 7.4M ./wp-admin 16K ./node 5.0G . Then one more time: root@bobby:/home/bobby/public_html$ cd wp-content/ root@bobby:/home/bobby/public_html/wp-content$ du -h --max-depth=1 3.6M ./themes 252K ./plugins 4.0K ./upgrade 4.9G ./large-folder 4.9G . And again: root@bobby:/home/bobby/public_html/wp-content/large-folder$ du -h --max-depth=1 4.9G . We’ve found the folder! We can see how many files are in the folder by running this command: root@bobby:/home/bobby/public_html/wp-content/large-folder$ ls -lah | wc -l 4794 Note: if you have a database service like MySQL, make sure Not to delete any files manually from the MySQL folder. This would cause issues with your database. If you are unable to clear any disk space I would recommend upgrading your Droplet. Let me know if you have any questions! Regards,BobbySource

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28: No space left on device error

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