Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@tsrivishnu
Last active August 21, 2023 11:31
Show Gist options
  • Star 11 You must be signed in to star a gist
  • Fork 1 You must be signed in to fork a gist
  • Save tsrivishnu/9f551ef0098021a913e01d6d594c555d to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Save tsrivishnu/9f551ef0098021a913e01d6d594c555d to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Increase inotify watchers in Docker images during build

Increasing fs.inotify.max_user_watches for Docker images

TL;DR You can't set those for an image during build time becasue Docker takes the sysctl configuration from the Host. So, set the config on your host machine.

As in this link, to increase the maximum watchers, we need set fs.inotify.max_user_watches to a higher number in /etc/sysctl.conf.

$ echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf
$ sudo sysctl -p

So, I immediately tried to add it to Dockerfile and build the image only to see the following error:

sysctl: setting key "fs.inotify.max_user_watches": Read-only file system

After some research, I realised that Docker doesn't let the sysctl to be modified during build for images because it takes it from the host.

So, I had to set the sysctl on the host, not in the `Dockerfile.

@Bronco97421
Copy link

Man you save my life !

@mrashad10
Copy link

I lost the half of my day search for this solution, thank you

@adityadubey057
Copy link

What if I am using Fargate and i need to update the fs.inotify.max_user_watches values,how is that possible then , as it is read mode ?

@vuhuythanh1995
Copy link

Thanks. It worked

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment