Easiest way to simulate no free disk space situation?

Question

I need to test my web app in a scenario where there’s no disk space remaining, i.e. I cannot write any more files. But I don’t want to fill my hard drive with junk just to make

Answer 1

Can't you use a Mock, and substitute the part of your code which actually writes to disk, with a fake test replacement which will throw the exception(s) you expect to see?

Answer 2

I'm not sure of how to do it on OSX but on Linux, I'd probably put a disk quota on my test user and then run the app.

Or maybe create a null file (a small one), format it as an ext3 partition, mount it using the loopback device and run the PHP app inside it. This would be closer to a physical disk that's short of space.

Answer 3

When I needed to do this I created a virtual machine with limited space allocated to the virtual disk.

Answer 4

Have you tried mount with -f -r ? It's not really low disk space, but it should throw an error from the same level.

Answer 5

Create a disk/filesystem image in a regular file (of limited size) and loop mount it.

But if you'll be doing this often I'd create a virtual machine—you'll find opportunity to reuse it.

Answer 6

Wherever you obtain the remaining disk space, just comment it out and run your app with a replacement values such as 0.1, 0, -1