Hello, I have a small Discourse instance on a server with 25GB of space. Presently it only has 3.4 GB free, and I’m not sure why. This is preventing me from running updates. There are no services running on this instance besides Discourse, nor have there ever been So far to free up space I’ve: d…

It depends on mostly your uploads but also backups and postgres if your site is very large (which it sounds like is not the problem). How large are your uploads? The admin dashboard should say at the bottom.

It’s less then 50MB, this isn’t a big or old instance at all. As I mentioned, I considered moving it off the main drive but I don’t think that’s the major issue here.

If your uploads are ~25MB and your postgres is ~1GB I would suspect that Discourse is making backups you don’t need. I would check your backup retention settings (Admin > Settings > Backups) and look at your current backups (Admin > Backups) and delete any you don’t need. Nevermind. Would help if I…

I deleted the one backup remaining after copying it off disk. I still only have 3.5 GB left.

Yes apologies, I just updated my post with updated instructions.

This server doesn’t have a /shared/ directory. Here’s what I got from du -sh /var/discourse/*, only 658M in total: 4.0K /var/discourse/LICENSE 12K /var/discourse/README.md 4.0K /var/discourse/bin 4.0K /var/discourse/cids 8.0K /var/discourse/containers 12K /var/discourse/discour…

Sorry, forgot to mention you needed to be in the container. The file you mentioned is from Docker. You can check what it’s being used by with docker system df and do a global prune with docker system prune if required, just make sure Discourse is running when you do so.

Ah, that’d make sense. In the container, the only thing is larger then a GB is /var/www/discourse/vendor/bundle/ruby/ at 2.1 GB I will add if I prune the image the update pulls, I have enough space, but when I attempt to update and it pulls it again, I lose it. So almost 5GB of space is the new im…

Are you able to show the output of that docker command? That directory is all of the Ruby gems and that size doesn’t seem alarming to me.

Indeed, please show all your outputs. I wouldn’t recommend looking around inside the container - your problem is at system level, and that’s where to start looking. And don’t look where you think there might be a problem, but look at the whole picture. First, reboot. You want a clean filesystem…

Disk space too full to update Discourse instance

Support Self-hosting

pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman) July 11, 2026, 4:05am 14

This will likely solve your problem.

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Disk space too full to update Discourse instance

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