No space left on device

Issue: When trying to install a package, you get the error message No space left on device

Root cause: Too little space available on your device's flash. (happens easily on devices with only 4MB flash)

There are two main ways to do this:

1. By removing packages you installed after flashing OpenWrt onto your Router (e.g. packages installed via opkg install or the Software page in LuCI).
   • You can remove such packages via opkg remove or via the Software page in LuCI.
   • You cannot remove packages on the SquashFS partition, which is included in the image you flashed.
2. By creating a custom OpenWrt image that contains also the extra packages you installed after flashing OpenWrt onto your Router. This allows these packages to take up less space on disk because the contents of the SquashFS partition are compressed.
   • See the next section for instructions.

This happens easily with recent firmware on 4MB Flash devices. To address this, you can press-fit an OpenWrt image into this small flash by building your own image tailored to your requirements, with only the packages you need:

• via Attended Sysupgrade in LuCI (if you have luci-app-attendedsysupgrade installed), by selecting from the version menu the same version that is currently installed (marked with [installed])
• via Image Builder
• via custom build

• If you need even more space for package installation, you probably want Extroot.
• If you just want simple USB storage for e.g. pictures, video, music, see Using storage devices.

See also OPKG troubleshooting: Out of space