Hey all. My name is Lee, and I’ve been self-hosting Discourse on and off since 2013. I remember having to screw around with rbenv to even get started. I remember having to compile nginx with Phusion Passenger to make things run. I remember arguing with @sam probably ten damn years ago that switching to Docker was capitulating to developer it-works-with-my-home-directory-and-my-nightmare-of-dotfiles weakness (and being dead-ass wrong!). I remember the first time I heard the phrase “bike-shedding”. To quote the man, I remember everything.
After being away for several years, I’ve had occasion to come back to self-hosting Discourse as a replacement for native Wordpress comments on a Houston-area weather site that typically does ~10k PV/day, but during hurricanes, might do ~2 million PV/day to ~1 million unique visitors. We’ve struggled with wordpress’ native comments for years, but as of last Wednesday, we’re live on self-hosted Discourse. (And on Graviton3, no less! Seriously, it just works and it’s great.)
Here’s the point I’m getting round to: it’s 2025, and as a self-hoster I’m still dealing with manually managing my docker image space. I present a story about /dev/root, told in code snippets, after less than a week in production:
[11:49:56] 0 ✓ (1.8ms)
root@discourse:/var/discourse # df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 30G 21G 9.6G 69% /
tmpfs 7.7G 0 7.7G 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 3.1G 1.1M 3.1G 1% /run
tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
efivarfs 128K 3.6K 125K 3% /sys/firmware/efi/efivars
/dev/nvme1n1p16 891M 109M 720M 14% /boot
/dev/nvme1n1p15 98M 6.4M 92M 7% /boot/efi
/dev/nvme0n1 32G 346M 30G 2% /var/discourse
tmpfs 1.6G 12K 1.6G 1% /run/user/1001
overlay 30G 21G 9.6G 69% /var/lib/docker/overlay2/5a649418bbfc064f488e895572eec1ace487a3eaa324fe1d8e3b395e6c5e3645/merged
[11:49:59] 0 ✓ (4.8ms)
root@discourse:/var/discourse # ./launcher cleanup
WARNING! This will remove all stopped containers.
Are you sure you want to continue? [y/N] y
Total reclaimed space: 0B
WARNING! This will remove all images without at least one container associated to them.
Are you sure you want to continue? [y/N] y
Deleted Images:
untagged: discourse/base@sha256:3696bdf18652b5455bd33795ec3b8e0f201c17a04f0e0126fc0317ed821373cd
....
[a whoooooooooooooooole lot of lines redacted]
....
Total reclaimed space: 12.43GB
[11:50:34] 0 ✓ (27.8s)
root@discourse:/var/discourse # df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 30G 6.9G 24G 23% /
tmpfs 7.7G 0 7.7G 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 3.1G 1.1M 3.1G 1% /run
tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
efivarfs 128K 3.6K 125K 3% /sys/firmware/efi/efivars
/dev/nvme1n1p16 891M 109M 720M 14% /boot
/dev/nvme1n1p15 98M 6.4M 92M 7% /boot/efi
/dev/nvme0n1 32G 346M 30G 2% /var/discourse
tmpfs 1.6G 12K 1.6G 1% /run/user/1001
overlay 30G 6.9G 24G 23% /var/lib/docker/overlay2/5a649418bbfc064f488e895572eec1ace487a3eaa324fe1d8e3b395e6c5e3645/merged
[11:55:28] 0 ✓ (3.3ms)
root@discourse:/var/discourse #
I love you guys. I love discourse. I am wedded to the product and I intend to keep using it more or less forever.
But, like…just, why. Why is it 2025 and I am personally by my own-ass self still screwing around with launcher cleanup? Why is image management not an inherent function of launcher?
Again, I love you guys. I chose Discourse for SCW because I believe in what you guys have built and I love using it. But like… that’s half my poor AMI’s boot volume tied up with useless crap that could—at least if I understand the technical side of things—be automatically managed.
Not meaning to complain—just checking in again after a few years away from the admin’s chair. I love the AI spam detection and the AI triage, especially in a weather forum where politically charged posts re: climate change (either for or against) are a regular feature. Thanks for everything <3
If I undestood right those images, that were destroyed because they weren’t used by any container, weren’t images in the meaning pictures at all as I’ve reckoned all the time 
