/etc

tags: docker, mac
Originally Published: 2015-01-28

If you’ve installed docker/boot2docker on Mac OS X and are getting no space left on device errors, you’re likely to have already come across some arcane instructions for increasing boot2docker volume size. If you’ve already tried removing untagged docker images and are still running into space issues (maybe you’re just trying to build something really big?), you can actually very easily change your boot2docker volume size by editing your boot2docker configuration.1 2

Add the following line(s) to ~/.boot2docker/profile (creating it if it’s not already there):

# Disk image size in MB
DiskSize = 100000

This would give you a boot2docker VM with ~100GB of disk.

If you’d also like to run memory-intensive jobs with docker (you can change the memory limit of an individual docker run command with the -m flag), you can also add a line like:

Memory = 8192

To give you a boot2docker VM with 8GB of memory, for example.

In order for these changes to take effect, you need to destroy your boot2docker VM and recreate it:

⚠︎ WARNING: THIS WILL DELETE ANY AND ALL LOCAL DOCKER CONTAINERS, IMAGES, AND LAYERS YOU HAVE NOT PUSHED ⚠︎

boot2docker stop
boot2docker destroy
boot2docker init
boot2docker start

Verify changes with boot2docker config or by ssh’ing into the boot2docker VM with boot2docker ssh and using e.g. df -h or cat /proc/meminfo.

Footnotes:

  1. With the release of docker-machine, that’s probably how you’re running docker under OS X now and these instructions no longer apply. However, if you were previously running boot2docker and follow the docker-machine migration instructions, any changes you made to boot2docker disk and memory sizes should carry over. With the docker-machine VirtualBox driver, you should be able to use --virtualbox-disk-size and --virtualbox-memory as arguments to docker-machine create -d virtualbox; presumably, you can do the same stop/rm/create/start cycle around this. 

  2. With the release of Docker for Mac, the method for resizing the available disk space for containers/images has changed yet again. Apparently Docker for Mac defaults to a 64GB sparse disk image. The following instructions may work for resizing it: https://forums.docker.com/t/consistently-out-of-disk-space-in-docker-beta/9438/46