I am experimenting with the Directory Update Module. I only have 4GB emmc space on the Beaglebones, tight for docker so I want to push the nodejs diectory including the node_modules, captured from a development reference device.
My artifact *.mender file is 37MB in size, the unpacked nodejs tree is 200MB. I have 387MB available on the partition. I deployed the artifact and it never finished the downloading stage. I rebooted my target device and aborted the deployment. Now the device doesn’t check into Mender.io anymore, and I see complains about disk space in the journalctl output.
My first question is if there could be a stale artifact on the device now that causes this behavior? If so, how can I remove it to make it connect again? I decommissioned it and wait for it to come in.
Secondly I am trying to learn about the update. I feel like I should have enough space to deploy this directory update. If understand the “directory” shell script correctly it first tars up my old 200MB nodejs directory, probably to a similar sized 37MB tar ball, then deletes the target directory, then unpacks the new artifact. So I assume there aren’t multiple unpacked directory trees on the device at any time and it should fit, however I get this space error.
I hope someone can help me out here. I feel that I am super close, yet this is another roadblock I don’t understand. Once my device connects again I want to add a pre-script stopping my nodejs service, and then a post-script restarting it (or maybe rebooting). Is this what people do for nodejs apps if there is no room for docker?
Thanks for all support here, I really appreciate this community and hope I can give back some day 
Here the output:
sudo journalctl -u mender-client
-- Logs begin at Sat 2022-07-02 19:34:26 PDT, end at Sat 2022-07-02 19:38:37 PDT. --
Jul 02 19:34:57 JF-912-00031-200804F systemd[1]: Started Mender OTA update service.
Jul 02 19:35:03 JF-912-00031-200804F mender[1312]: time="2022-07-02T19:35:03-07:00" level=info msg="Loaded configuration file: /var/lib/mender/mender.conf"
Jul 02 19:35:03 JF-912-00031-200804F mender[1312]: time="2022-07-02T19:35:03-07:00" level=info msg="Loaded configuration file: /etc/mender/mender.conf"
Jul 02 19:35:03 JF-912-00031-200804F mender[1312]: time="2022-07-02T19:35:03-07:00" level=info msg="'UpdateControlMapExpirationTimeSeconds' is not set in the Mender configuration file. Falling back to the default of 2*UpdatePollIntervalSeconds"
Jul 02 19:35:03 JF-912-00031-200804F mender[1312]: time="2022-07-02T19:35:03-07:00" level=info msg="'UpdateControlMapBootExpirationTimeSeconds' is not set in the Mender configuration file. Falling back to the default of 600 seconds"
Jul 02 19:35:14 JF-912-00031-200804F mender[1312]: time="2022-07-02T19:35:14-07:00" level=info msg="Mender running on partition: /dev/mmcblk1p2"
Jul 02 19:35:22 JF-912-00031-200804F mender[1312]: time="2022-07-02T19:35:22-07:00" level=info msg="State transition: init [none] -> init [none]"
Jul 02 19:35:22 JF-912-00031-200804F mender[1312]: time="2022-07-02T19:35:22-07:00" level=error msg="Failed to restore state data: mdb_txn_commit: no space left on device"
Jul 02 19:35:22 JF-912-00031-200804F mender[1312]: time="2022-07-02T19:35:22-07:00" level=error msg="Failed to restore state data: mdb_txn_commit: no space left on device"
Jul 02 19:35:22 JF-912-00031-200804F mender[1312]: time="2022-07-02T19:35:22-07:00" level=info msg="State transition: init [none] -> update-error [ArtifactFailure]"
Jul 02 19:35:22 JF-912-00031-200804F mender[1312]: time="2022-07-02T19:35:22-07:00" level=error msg="Could not write state data to persistent storage: mdb_txn_commit: no space left on device"
Jul 02 19:35:22 JF-912-00031-200804F mender[1312]: time="2022-07-02T19:35:22-07:00" level=error msg="Could not write state data to persistent storage: mdb_txn_commit: no space left on device"
Jul 02 19:35:22 JF-912-00031-200804F mender[1312]: time="2022-07-02T19:35:22-07:00" level=error msg="fatal error: mdb_txn_commit: no space left on device"
Jul 02 19:35:23 JF-912-00031-200804F mender[1312]: time="2022-07-02T19:35:22-07:00" level=error msg="fatal error: mdb_txn_commit: no space left on device"
Jul 02 19:35:23 JF-912-00031-200804F mender[1312]: time="2022-07-02T19:35:23-07:00" level=error msg="fatal error: mdb_txn_commit: no space left on device"
Jul 02 19:35:23 JF-912-00031-200804F mender[1312]: time="2022-07-02T19:35:23-07:00" level=error msg="fatal error: mdb_txn_commit: no space left on device"
Jul 02 19:35:23 JF-912-00031-200804F systemd[1]: mender-client.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
Jul 02 19:35:23 JF-912-00031-200804F systemd[1]: mender-client.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 211M 0 211M 0% /dev
tmpfs 48M 2.6M 46M 6% /run
/dev/mmcblk1p2 1.8G 1.3G 387M 77% /
tmpfs 239M 0 239M 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5.0M 4.0K 5.0M 1% /run/lock
tmpfs 239M 0 239M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mmcblk1p4 12M 12M 0 100% /data
/dev/mmcblk1p1 16M 6.9M 9.1M 44% /boot/efi
/dev/mmcblk0p1 30G 7.4G 21G 27% /media
tmpfs 48M 0 48M 0% /run/user/1001