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Troubleshooting creation and deletion of Codespaces

In this article

This article provides troubleshooting steps for common issues you may experience when creating or deleting a codespace, including storage and configuration issues.

Codespaces is available for organizations using GitHub Team or GitHub Enterprise Cloud. For more information, see "GitHub's products."

Creating codespaces

No access to create a codespace

Codespaces are not available for all repositories. If the "Open with Codespaces" button is missing, Codespaces may not be available for that repository. For more information, see "Creating a codespace."

If you believe your organization has enabled Codespaces, make sure that an organization owner or billing manager has set the spending limit for Codespaces. For more information, see "Managing your spending limit for Codespaces."

Codespace does not open when created

If you create a codespace and it does not open:

  1. Try reloading the page in case there was a caching or reporting problem.
  2. Go to your Codespaces page: https://github.com/codespaces and check whether the new codespace is listed there. The process may have successfully created the codespace but failed to report back to your browser. If the new codespace is listed, you can open it directly from that page.
  3. Retry creating the codespace for the repository to rule out a transient communication failure.

If you still cannot create a codespace for a repository where Codespaces are available, you may need to contact support. For more information, see "Working with support."

Deleting codespaces

The owner of a codespace has full control over it and only they can delete their codespaces. You cannot delete a codespace created by another user.

Container storage

When you create a codespace, it has a finite amount of storage and over time it may be necessary for you to free up space. Try running any of the following commands in the Codespaces terminal to free up storage space.

  • Remove packages that are no longer used by using sudo apt autoremove.
  • Clean the apt cache by using sudo apt clean.
  • See the top 10 largest files in the codespace withsudo find / -printf '%s %p\n'| sort -nr | head -10.
  • Delete unneeded files, such as build artifacts and logs.

Some more destructive options:

  • Remove unused Docker images, networks, and containers by using docker system prune (append -a if you want to remove all images, and --volumes if you want to remove all volumes).
  • Remove untracked files from working tree: git clean -i.

Configuration

If changes to your codespace's configuration cause a container error, your codespace will run in recovery mode, and you will see an error message.

This codespace is currently running in recovery mode due to a container error.

Review the creation logs, update the configuration as needed, and run Codespaces: Rebuild Container in the VS Code Command Palette to retry. For more information, see " Codespaces logs" and "Configuring Codespaces for your project."