This website (currently) runs on AWS, with a standard Amazon Linux 2 AMI instance. After uploading a few more content onto the site (mostly images), I ran up to the limit of the EBS Elastic Volume that I had initially configured when setting up the instance.

While the process of modifying the volume size and subsequentially extending the partition and filesystem is very well documented in an AWS tutorial, I thought it might be helpful to walk through the specific steps I went through for my setup.

Step 1: Modify/increase the size of the volume in the AWS Console

To kick off the process, we must first raise the volume size in the AWS Console. You can navigate to the list of your available volumes from your EC2 dashboard and go to “Volumes”. In my case, I decided the increase the size from 12GB to 20GB.

Modifying the volume size in AWS Console
Modifying the volume size in AWS Console

Step 2: Check whether the volume has a partition

A partition already exists because it is an existing volume whose size I am trying to increase.

[ec2-user ~]$ lsblk
NAME    MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
xvda    202:0    0  20G  0 disk 
└─xvda1 202:1    0  12G  0 part /

Step 3: Extend the partition

To extend the partition, we run the growpart command and specify the partition to extend.

[ec2-user ~]$ sudo growpart /dev/xvda 1
CHANGED: partition=1 start=4096 old: size=25161695 end=25165791 new: size=41938911 end=41943007

We can now verify that the partition has been extended.

[ec2-user ~]$ lsblk
NAME    MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
xvda    202:0    0  20G  0 disk 
└─xvda1 202:1    0  20G  0 part /

Step 4: Extend the file system

First, we need to get the name, size, type, and mount point for the file system we need to extend.

[ec2-user ~]$ df -hT
Filesystem     Type      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/xvda1     xfs        12G   11G  1.1G  92% /

We can see that the /dev/xvda1 file system is currently 12GB in size, its type is xfs, and its mount point is /.

Next, we can use xfs_growfs command to extend the file system, specifying the mount point at the end.

[ec2-user ~]$ sudo xfs_growfs -d /
...
data blocks changed from 3145211 to 5242363

Step 4: Verify that the file system has been extended

Running df -hT again, the output should now reflect our changes.

[ec2-user ~]$ df -hT
Filesystem     Type      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/xvda1     xfs        20G   11G  9.0G  56% /