Disk usage and cleanup

Images, VM disks and logs live under ~/.cua (CUA_HOME moves them).

cua cache du                        # usage per category, budget, free space
cua sb ls                           # SIZE column (--no-size skips it)

Automatic cleanup#

• Cache budget. Pulled images, macOS base VMs and local builds share one budget: 30 GiB or 10% of free space, whichever is smaller. Least recently used entries go first, after every pull and build and when the daemon is idle.
• Never removed: sandboxes (running or stopped), anything a sandbox uses, checkpoints, and Docker objects the SDK did not create or pull.
• Ephemeral sandboxes are deleted with their handle. If the program crashes, the next cua sb command or the daemon deletes them 10 minutes later.
• Logs are capped at 10 MiB per file (also the Lume installer's /tmp logs when cua installed Lume).
• Screenshots from cua do screenshot without --save go to ~/.cua/screenshots; the newest 20 are kept.

Free space now#

cua cache prune --dry-run   # what would go
cua cache prune             # down to the budget
cua cache prune --all       # every unused cache entry
cua sb rm my-box -f         # a sandbox and all its disks

Settings#

cua cache config --budget 50G --min-free 10G

{
  "budget": "50G",
  "min_free": "10G",
  "warn_free": "20G",
  "orphan_reap_minutes": 10,
  "auto_gc": true
}

The environment wins: CUA_CACHE_BUDGET (auto, off or a size), CUA_DISK_MIN_FREE (default 5G), CUA_DISK_WARN_FREE (20G), CUA_ORPHAN_REAP_MINUTES (10), CUA_CACHE_AUTO_GC (0 turns it off).

Low disk#

A pull, build or VM create that would leave less than CUA_DISK_MIN_FREE fails before writing anything: CuaError.InsufficientDisk in the SDKs, exit code 7 in the CLI.

cua: insufficient disk: not enough disk space to pull ghcr.io/trycua/linux:24.04:
it needs about 3.2 GiB and cua keeps 5.0 GiB free, but only 6.1 GiB is available
on /Users/me/.cua/images (run `cua cache prune` to free space, or lower
CUA_DISK_MIN_FREE)

cua-bench results#

Kept until you remove them; cua-bench warns past 10 GiB (CUA_BENCH_WARN_SIZE). Keep fewer with cb run ... --keep-runs 20 or cb prune --runs --keep 20.