Error building a container when using the OCI Cloud Shell 🫙

This afternoon I was using the OCI Cloud Shell to build a container to be pushed to the OCI Container Registry which I was then going to create an OCI Container Instance from. This is something that I’ve done countless times without any issues, as I was short of time (I’m going on holiday tomorrow) as is typical, anything that could go wrong, did 😭.

When running the following command from the OCI Cloud Shell to build the container.

docker build --tag container-name .

It returned the following error (interesting bits in bold).

Error: committing container for step {Env:[PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin LANG=C.UTF-8 GPG_KEY=E3FF2839C048B25C084DEBE995E310250568 PYTHON_VERSION=3.9.21 PYTHON_SHA256=3126f59592c9b0d7955f2bf7b081fa1ca35ce7a6fea980108d752a05bb1] Command:run Args:[pip3 install -r requirements.txt] Flags:[] Attrs:map[] Message:RUN pip3 install -r requirements.txt Heredocs:[] Original:RUN pip3 install -r requirements.txt}: copying layers and metadata for container “4aa0c966251fa75dac10afc257b8c8d62aae50c45eb5dd1157d3c1cae0208413”: writing blob: adding layer with blob “sha256:5699f359aa00daa8a93b831b478fea1fe7c339396e532f13e859fb4ef92fd83f”: processing tar file(open /usr/local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/oci/addons/adk/__pycache__/agent_client.cpython-39.pyc: no space left on device): exit status 1

After much Googling (without much luck I may add!) I had a brainwave – the OCI Cloud Console only provides 5GB storage as per the documentation – perhaps I’d hit the storage limit 🤔:

It turned out that the majority of the storage consumed was by Docker / Podman (as a side note the Cloud Shell now uses Podman, however the Docker commands are aliased to it, so you can continue to use them).

So……it looked like I needed to do some housekeeping 🧹.

To identify the storage used by Docker / Podman, you can run the following command:

docker system df

Which returned the following:

To free up some space I ran the following command (which is a little brute force, I may add 🔨):

docker system prune -a

Using my YOLO approach, I selected y to continue which worked its magic and free’d up some space (please take heed of the warnings ⚠️).

I then had plenty of free space and could build the container successfully ✅

I can now enjoy my holiday, safe in the knowledge that I managed to fix this issue 🗺️.