Ubuntu retains apt package downloads. It also default installs all locales (language packs). These can be freed up to reclaim as much disk space as possible. This should come in handy on VPS servers, especially the smaller ones backed by SSDs. For example the smallest Linode server currently available is a 24GB SSD so every free MB counts. On larger severs, it probably isn’t worth it though. Was able to reclaim about 200MB in my case.
In summary I ran the following:
sudo apt-get install localepurge sudo apt-get clean sudo apt-get autoremove sudo reboot
After initial setup of a new Ubuntu app server it was using 1.86 GB. Then after running the above commands it was using 1.66 GB, so about 200MB was freed up. May not be worth your while and your mileage may vary (YMMV)!
Original Disk Usage:
laurence@appserver:~$ df Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/root 24505644 1960172 21283904 9% / ...
Resulting Disk Usage:
laurence@appserver:~$ df Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/root 24505644 1743556 21500520 8% / ...
About localepurge:
Localepruge is a tool that gets rid of all the language packs you don’t need (because you can’t read 400+ languages). Run it at your own risk!
It defaults to keeping en-US packages, but loads a dump terminal style menu that lets you pick the languages / locales you want to keep. Have fun wading through the hundreds of options in the menu if you want to change the settings. Use the tab key to get to the <ok> button.
It requires a reboot after being installed to finish the cleanup process.
Before using it, please read more about localepurge here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LocaleConf
About apt-get clean:
Ubuntu saves packages downloaded through apt before they are installed. This can start to add up.
To see how much space the cached packages are using run:
sudo du -sh /var/cache/apt/archives
Mine was only using 32MB at the time, but the command freed it up completely.
To delete the cached packages:
sudo apt-get clean
You’ll probably want to run that command periodically, or each time after running `apt-get upgrade`.
About apt-get autoremove:
This command cleans up packages that were installed as dependencies to packages that are no longer installed.
Eg, if package A required package B and C, but you uninstalled package A, package B and C would still be around. Calling autoremove will ‘take care’ of package B and C.
On a freshly installed server, you probably won’t free up much space with this command but if your server has whiskers it may help.