Regain space on FreeBSD by removing obsolete packages/ports
A quick one explaining how I easily gained disk space on one of my FreeBSD servers.
The context
On one of my VM (running FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE), which I used mostly as web server, I got from time to time an issue with disk space.
Most of the time, I quickly fixed the problem by removing some backups (since they are scp'ed into another machine), but I wanted to fix the problem for real.
Disk
Here's the initial disk space I had:
root@freebsd:~ # df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/vtbd0p2 46G 29G 13G 70% /
13 GB free, while OK, is not much especially since I do weekly backups.
Let's gain some space
Since I used both ports and packages on that machine, I decided to do some cleanup.
Step 1: pkg autoremove
According to the pkg man page, pkg autoremove "deletes packages which were
automatically installed as dependencies and are not required any more."
Seems like a good first candidate, let's do it!
pkg autoremove -y
Number of packages to be removed: 223
The operation will free 912 MiB.
Once done, we have:
root@freebsd:~ # df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/vtbd0p2 46G 28G 14G 67% /
Roughly 1 GB save - not much, let's continue!
Step 2: portmaster
How about cleaning the ports?
portmaster has an option just for that: --clean-distiles:
"recurse through the installed ports to get a list of distinfo files, then recurse through all files in /usr/ports/distfiles to make sure that they are still associated with an installed port. If not, offer to delete the stale file. With the -t option a distfile is considered valid if it is in use by any port, not just those installed.
-y --clean-distfiles does the same as above, but deletes all files without prompting."
Brilliant, let's try!
portmaster --clean-distfiles -y
===>>> Gathering distinfo list for installed ports
===>>> Checking for stale distfiles
Which gives:
root@freebsd:~ # df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/vtbd0p2 46G 20G 22G 48% /
=> 8 GB regained, not too bad!
Step 3: pkg clean
Let's try a last option: pkg clean "cleans the local cache of fetched remote
packages."
pkg clean -a
gives us:
root@freebsd:~ # df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/vtbd0p2 46G 20G 22G 47% /
It saved a bit of disk, even though it's not obvious with df -h, a df -k
would have showed it: the disk went from 48% capacity used to 47%.
Wrap Up
A quick and easy way to gain space on a FreeBSD machine - I'll add this to my maintenance routine :)
Are you using other tools? Let me know on Twitter!
Tags: FreeBSD