Document how to grow the disk size

[jandubois]

With 1.20.0 you can grow (but not shrink) the disk size simply by creating an override.yaml file:

echo "disk: 200GB" >"$HOME/Library/Application Support/rancher-desktop/lima/_config/override.yaml"

Or on Linux:

echo "disk: 200GB" >"$HOME/.local/share/rancher-desktop/lima/_config/override.yaml"

Once you restart the disk will grow automatically.

See also ddev/ddev#7592

[ultimike]

@jandubois Just to confirm, this will not reset the disk (erasing current content), correct? This will simply add to the current size, I assume?

Is there someway to find out what the current size is?

thanks,
-mike

[jandubois]

It will grow the disk and automatically then also grow the partition inside the disk to use the additional space. The filesystem inside the disk is not affected.

This is also the reason you cannot shrink the disk size: you would need to first shrink the partition, which in turn would require moving used disk blocks below the new partition boundary etc, which is all much more complicated than adding more blocks to the partition, which by definition will be unallocated at the time.

On macOS you can see the max and currently used sizes with these commands:

❯ ls -lh ~/Library/Application\ Support/rancher-desktop/lima/0/diffdisk
-rw-r--r--@ 1 jan  staff   100G Sep 15 14:05 /Users/jan/Library/Application Support/rancher-desktop/lima/0/diffdisk

❯ du -h ~/Library/Application\ Support/rancher-desktop/lima/0/diffdisk
384M	/Users/jan/Library/Application Support/rancher-desktop/lima/0/diffdisk

The du number is the size actually used on the filesystem because the disk image is a "sparse" file, so any unallocated blocks are not committed.