Discourse upgrade fails due to insufficient disk space on 25G droplet

I have a 25g droplet, which Discourse claims should be big enough, but I cannot do the upgrade to the latest version as I’ve run out of storage. My forum is very small with very little traffic.

I ran ./launcher cleanup and even deleted old backups, but still no joy.

What can I do?

root@DO-Discourse:/var/discourse# ./launcher rebuild app
x86_64 arch detected.

WARNING: We are about to start downloading the Discourse base image
This process may take anywhere between a few minutes to an hour, depending on your network speed

Please be patient

2.0.20220224-2005: Pulling from discourse/base
5eb5b503b376: Pull complete 
35b2f73fc27b: Pull complete 
44526e3ec669: Pull complete 
Digest: sha256:8a8bb9525882220196c0faa8ce95c62a7fb607fc203d4247b3d5985f3ca9c3d8
Status: Downloaded newer image for discourse/base:2.0.20220224-2005
docker.io/discourse/base:2.0.20220224-2005
You have less than 5GB of free space on the disk where /var/lib/docker is located. You will need more space to continue
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/vda1        25G   22G  3.0G  88% /

Would you like to attempt to recover space by cleaning docker images and containers in the system? (y/N)y
If the cleanup was successful, you may try again now
root@DO-Discourse:/var/discourse# 
root@DO-Discourse:/var/discourse# df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev            448M     0  448M   0% /dev
tmpfs            99M  1.1M   98M   2% /run
/dev/vda1        25G   18G  6.2G  75% /
tmpfs           491M     0  491M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
tmpfs           491M     0  491M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/vda15      105M  9.2M   96M   9% /boot/efi
overlay          25G   18G  6.2G  75% /var/lib/docker/overlay2/d319d95263d87c2a75a4bc9a9f03a25ea7f6eb1f7bac687e7ae7d45522939dc0/merged
/dev/loop10      56M   56M     0 100% /snap/core18/2284
/dev/loop7       44M   44M     0 100% /snap/snapd/14978
/dev/loop5       62M   62M     0 100% /snap/core20/1361
/dev/loop2       68M   68M     0 100% /snap/lxd/22526
/dev/loop1       62M   62M     0 100% /snap/core20/1376
/dev/loop3       44M   44M     0 100% /snap/snapd/15177
/dev/loop4       56M   56M     0 100% /snap/core18/2344
/dev/loop6       68M   68M     0 100% /snap/lxd/22753
tmpfs            99M     0   99M   0% /run/user/0
root@DO-Discourse:/var/discourse# 

You could try running ./launcher cleanup but if that doesn’t help, you’ll have to add more disk to your server.

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You could (but shouldn’t)
./launcher rebuild app --skip-prereqs

As I said earlier, did that already, a few times, actually.
I had read that discourse needs 20 - 30gb ideally. I have 25gb so it’s odd that it should need more. Have the requirements changed?

Not sure what you mean.

I mean short term on a test instance, i did try it (I think it went ok with 4.6Go free) , I wouldn’t on a prod one

sudo apt autoremove --purge maybe?

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Also see if you have lots of backups.

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Storage requirements depend upon how much media is being uploaded to your discourse instance.

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It’s surprising how quickly my DO sandbox site grows as I play around.
If you are having problems now you may just be able to delete enough to get Discourse to upgrade, but next time the database will be a little bigger and you may have more media.
If you do have lots of media moving to S3 storage will free space if not a droplet resize may be your only option.

On DO the AMD droplet is supposed to be way better … not my benchmarks (I read it on the internet :face_with_raised_eyebrow:) - here

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Copy that. Where is the amount of storage used shown?

Understood. My database is 60mb and I deleted all the backups.

As I said earlier, deleted all backups. (My DB is only 60mb though so that made no real difference)

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root@DO-Discourse:/var/discourse# apt autoremove --purge
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 94 not upgraded.
root@DO-Discourse:/var/discourse#

Something you can try is to clear the apt cache.

apt clean

You could also try running

du -h -s /* | sort -h -r

to find out where the space is being used. If, for example, the majority is under /usr, you can repeat with

du -h -s /usr/* | sort -h -r

and so on. With any luck, that’ll lead to some big thing(s) that can be cleared but obviously don’t delete anything without an understanding of what it is - i.e. don’t delete anything unless you’re certain it’s safe to do so.

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For a quick check, there’s an Uploads amount on your /admin dashboard:

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Did my previous command give that info?

root@DO-Discourse:/var/discourse# cd ..
root@DO-Discourse:/var# cd ..
root@DO-Discourse:/# du -h --max-depth=1 -x
13G     ./var
301M    ./boot
5.4M    ./etc
116K    ./tmp
4.0K    ./srv
4.0K    ./home
28K     ./snap
4.0K    ./media
3.3G    ./usr
4.0K    ./mnt
901M    ./root
24K     ./opt
16K     ./lost+found
19G     .
root@DO-Discourse:/#