Increase boot2docker space allocation in OSX

Docker with boot2docker

• In OSX environment you have to install docker with boot2docker(light weight linux VM)
• More info: Install docker with boot2docker in OSX

Space issue with boot2docker

• Sometime when working with docker in OSX environment you could get the error

  no space left on device

• The reason for this error is

  total size of docker images is exceed than the space allocates to boot2docker VM

• To overcome this issue, you could simply remove the unwanted images.

• Sometimes this won't works, because you could be get some situation where docker daemon cannot starts(because of the space issue on boot2ocker VM)

• In this situation you have to increase the space allocates to boot2docker VM

Increase boot2docker VM space

• You can increase the boot2docker VM space without removing/destroying your existing images.
• More info: boot2docker volume resize
• In here I'm going to demonstrate you how to initialise boot2docker with more space and memory via boot2docker profile.
• In this way you have remove/destroy existing boot2docker VM(So it will remove all your local docker images/containers/layers)
• Following are the steps

1. Stop and destroy boot2docker

boot2docker stop
boot2docker destroy

2. Create boot2docker profile

• Create boot2docker config file in your home ~/.boot2docker/profile (create this directory and file if not exists)
• We can configure boot2docker VM space and memory via this configuration file
• More info: boot2docker configuration
• Add following content to ~/.boot2docker/profile file

# VM disk image size in MB
DiskSize = 61440

# VM memory size in MB
Memory = 6144

• Things to notice here

  1. DiskSize = 61440 will allocates 60 GB space to boot2docker VM
  2. Memory = 6144 will allocates 6 GB memory to boot2docker VM

• After define configurations you have to reinitialise boot2docker VM

3. Reinitialise boot2docker

boot2docker init
boot2docker start

• This commands will creates fresh boot2docker VM with 60GB space and 6GB memory
• You can verify this configuration via ssh'ing to boot2docker VM

# connect to boot2docker VM
boot2docker ssh

# verify configuration
df -h
cat /proc/meminfo

• Following is an example output of cat /proc/meminfo

References

• boot2docker volume resize
• increasing boot2docker allocation on OSX