💡 This is a fork of https://github.com/jlumbroso/free-disk-space, only difference is that it's maintained actively.

A customizable GitHub Action to free disk space on Ubuntu GitHub Action runners.

On a typical Ubuntu runner, with all options turned on (or not turned off rather), this can clear up to 34 GB of disk space in 4-5 minutes (the longest period is calling apt to uninstall packages). This is useful when you need a lot of disk space to run computations.

name: Free Disk Space (Ubuntu)
on: push

jobs:
  reclaim:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:

    - name: Free Disk Space (Ubuntu)
      uses: insightsengineering/disk-space-reclaimer@v1
      with:
        # this might remove tools that are actually needed,
        # if set to "true" but frees about 6 GB
        tools-cache: false

        # all of these default to true, but feel free to set to
        # "false" if necessary for your workflow
        android: true
        dotnet: true
        haskell: true
        large-packages: true
        swap-storage: true
        docker-images: true
        tools-cache: true

Most of the options are self-explanatory.

The option tools-cache removes all the pre-cached tools (Node, Go, Python, Ruby, ...) that are loaded in a runner's environment, installed in the path specified by the AGENT_TOOLSDIRECTORY environment variable (the same environment variable is used across Windows/macOS/Linux runners, see an example of its use on the setup-python GitHub Action). This option was suggested by @miketimofeev.

This GitHub Actions came around because I kept rewriting the same few lines of rm -rf code.

Here are a few sources of inspiration:

• https://github.community/t/bigger-github-hosted-runners-disk-space/17267/11
• https://github.com/apache/flink/blob/master/tools/azure-pipelines/free_disk_space.sh
• https://github.com/ShubhamTatvamasi/free-disk-space-action
• actions/runner-images#2875 (comment)
• https://github.com/easimon/maximize-build-space/

The amount of space storage saved by each option on an ubuntu-22.04 runner is summarized here:

=> Android library: Saved 12GiB
=> .NET runtime: Saved 1.7GiB
=> Haskell runtime: Saved 0B
=> Large misc. packages: Saved 4.6GiB
=> Docker images: Saved 3.6GiB
=> Tool cache: Saved 8.4GiB
=> Swap storage: Saved 4.0GiB
=> Saved 30GiB

=> Total 34GiB