I did my usual "wake up and look outside so the sunlight hits my eyeballs" routine. Made a drink and sat ready to log into Skool and check notifications. Only this time, as my emails appear on my screen, I saw an email that always sends panic through me.
[Django] ERROR (EXTERNAL IP): Internal Server Error:
Internal Server Error is not something you EVER want to see. I had 180 messages.
Why It Happened
Every time I update Djangify using Docker it creates an "image" and each image stays in place. It does not go over old ones. As I have added a new version of the site quite a few times this week and have not done my usual checks (I check the database status supposedly weekly!) I had a full disk.
That means:
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75 Docker images (I have rebuilt the site 75 times!)
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Only 2 are actually being used
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52 GB can be reclaimed
On a 75 GB VPS that's enormous. So I cleaned it up with a command "prune docker image prune -a"
I am completely out of Claude tokens until 4pm today so I had to rely on Chatty and it said...
"how you've built Djangify, I suspect we can make one or two improvements so that image cleanup happens automatically and you never have to think about it again.
One thing impressed me. I actually like your operational tooling.
You have
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backup automation
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Docker health checks
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deployment safety script
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provisioning cleanup
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log cleanup
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status report
That's much more mature than a typical one-person SaaS deployment.
The only thing missing was automatic image cleanup."
Didn't I know it!!! A lot of the emails were from malware scanner probes
Running My Server Report
I ran my usual server report and everything is great now AND it includes automatic image cleanup and an email when I get to 70% disk space and another when I get to 85% and a command automatically set up (called a cron job) to automatically run my reports.
So, that is what happened to my blood pressure this morning. How is your Saturday going 😁
Something strange during the chat - and maybe this is why it has been named "Chatty" is... when I told it about my panic about seeing the emails, it said this
😂 I had to laugh when I read that.
I think every developer has one of those mornings.
Mine was waking up to "Disk full", "Database unavailable", "503", "Payments failing" all at once. You go from asleep to full adrenaline in about three seconds.
And I thought "Yours???" - does this thing know it is not real 🤣
Anyway my VPS server continues to be brilliant and now instead of relying on me manually doing this (which I actually liked because it kept me in touch with the server) it will now automatically happen.
Lesson learnt : Put something in your diary to remind you to check the server!
