Centos 6/7 freeing up disk space

In case you have a CentOS 6/7 server running out of space you may face to many unstable issues. We recommend to free up the disk space as soon as possible. In this article only top scenarios are highlighted.

Check the disk space

The first step should be checking the available disk space, type:

root$ df -l

You will get an output something similar to:

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/vda3        41G   41G   10M 100% /
tmpfs           3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/vda1       240M  151M   77M  67% /boot

Resolution: you are running out of space, start cleaning.

Cleaning logs

Execute the command below and it will truncate any *.log files on the volume /var that are either older than 7 days and greater than 50M or older than 30 days.

find /var -name "*.log" \( \( -size +50M -mtime +7 \) -o -mtime +30 \) -exec truncate {} --size 0 \;

The next step is installing yum-utils to manage the server:

yum -y install yum-utils

Flushing ‘yum’ cache

Let’s apply the command to cleanup ‘yum’ caches. It will not remove everything related to yum generally, only cache.

yum clean all

Removing orphan packages

Checking all existing orphan packages:

package-cleanup --quiet --leaves 

Then removing orphan packages selected by the previous command:

package-cleanup --quiet --leaves | xargs yum remove -y

Removing error_log files

Server panels are usually creating many log files not rotating. For example in cpanel you may find many of error_log files scattered across your users directories. Removing these files will free up an extra space:

find /home/*/public_html/ -name error_log -delete