Error: ENOSPC: no space left on device

Docker ENOSPC errors — "no space left on device" — inside containers often point to a tmpfs filesystem size limit rather than actual host disk exhaustion. Many Docker base images use tmpfs mounts for /tmp. The default tmpfs size in Docker containers is 64 MB. Write-intensive operations like extracting large archives, compilation steps that generate temporary object files, or buffering log output to /tmp can exhaust this limit even on a machine with hundreds of gigabytes of free disk space. docker run --tmpfs /tmp:rw,size=512m increases the /tmp tmpfs to 512 MB. In Docker Compose: add tmpfs: ['/tmp:rw,size=512m'] under the service definition. On macOS, Docker Desktop uses a virtual disk image with a fixed maximum size (default 64 GB in recent versions). If your Docker data fills this virtual disk, all container writes fail with ENOSPC, yet the host machine's available disk shows no change — the Docker VM disk and the macOS disk are entirely separate. Resizing the Docker Desktop disk image (Preferences > Resources) or clearing unused Docker data with docker system prune -a frees space inside the VM without affecting host disk. On Linux, Docker stores data in /var/lib/docker. Run df -h /var/lib/docker to check the actual filesystem's usage. If it lives on a separate partition (common in server setups), the host's root partition may show plenty of free space while /var/lib/docker's partition is full.