Why df Shows Zero Disk Space in Containers Even When the Host Has Plenty
Developers running pipelines in disposable containers can be misled by the df command, which reports zero available space even when the host machine has ample storage free. The issue stems from per-session write quotas on a container's writable layer, which df interprets using block-device semantics and displays as a full disk. Unlike a genuinely full host disk, a spent session quota can be resolved immediately by deleting temporary files such as build caches or unused dependencies. The author discovered this while debugging a recurring blog-publishing pipeline, where accumulated artifacts like node_modules caches and __pycache__ directories quietly exhausted the fixed allowance over multiple runs. The key takeaway is that distinguishing between a full host disk and an exhausted container quota leads to opposite — and critically different — remediation steps.
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