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Reduce Docker Log Size on Disk

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In cases where you are using the defaults for logging and your application logs a lot you can consume a lot of disk space and you can run out of disk space quite quickly.

If it's a case where you already ran out of disk space, we can investigate the disk space consumed by docker logs:

$ cd /var/lib/docker/containers
$ du -sh *
6.0G	14052251a0f13f46f65bc73d10c01408130ee8ae71529600ba5bd6bee76af4ee
1.2G	e6b40b1d30c5cf05e8cb201ca9abf6bd283d7cf7ceaa3be2a0422be7cd750a33

Referenced from https://blog.birkhoff.me/devops-truncate-docker-container-logs-periodically-to-free-up-server-disk-space/ you can truncate those files:

$ sh -c 'truncate -s 0 /var/lib/docker/containers/*/*-json.log'

Check the size again:

$ du -sh *
40K	14052251a0f13f46f65bc73d10c01408130ee8ae71529600ba5bd6bee76af4ee
36K	e6b40b1d30c5cf05e8cb201ca9abf6bd283d7cf7ceaa3be2a0422be7cd750a33

To overcome this issue you can use this in logging options in your compose:

...
    logging:
      driver: "json-file"
      options:
        max-size: "1m"
...

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