How to clean temporary Plesk files on a Linux server?

Applicable to:

Plesk for Linux

Question

Answer

There are two ways in Plesk to safely clean temporary Plesk files on a Linux server.

Note: Cleaning temporary Plesk files may not free up a lot of disk space. That means this solution may not help when there is no free disk space on a server.

Removing tmp files using the Plesk Repair Kit (Plesk 17.8)

Note: This solution is applicable to Plesk 17.8 on the following operating systems:

- CentOS/RHEL 7
- Debian 8
- Debian 9
- Ubuntu 16
- Ubuntu 18

For other OSes and Plesk versions, see the command-line instructions.

Open the Plesk Repair Kit by navigating to the following URL:

Note: Replace "203.0.113.2" in the URL below with your IP address/hostname.

PLESK_INFO: https://server.example.com:8443/repair/

OR

PLESK_INFO: https://203.0.113.2:8443/repair/
Input your Plesk Administrator credentials in the corresponding Username and Password fields and click Sign in.
Click the Free Up Disk Space button to clean temporary files:

Removing tmp files via a command-line interface

Connect to a Plesk server via SSH.
Delete temporary files that are older than X days from the /tmp and /var/tmp/ directories. In this example, we are removing temporary files that are older than 14 days:

# find /tmp -type f -mtime +14 -exec rm {} \;
# find /var/tmp -type f -mtime +14 -exec rm {} \;
Delete temporary files created by Plesk and its services:

Note: We recommend to run these commands when there are no active Plesk Installer and Plesk backup tasks on a server. To make sure there are no such tasks, check the Additional Information section.
- Temporary Plesk backup files:
  
  # rm -rf /usr/local/psa/PMM/tmp/*
- Other temporary files:
  
  # rm -rf /usr/local/psa/tmp/*

Additional Information

Checking for active Plesk Installer or Plesk backup tasks

Checking if Plesk Installer is running

In your Linux terminal, run the command:

# ps aux | grep autoinstaller | grep -v "grep"
- No output means Plesk Installer is inactive.
- If an output like below is returned:
  
  CONFIG_TEXT: root 6075 1.1 1.6 194908 17232 ? S 09:28 0:00 /usr/local/psa/admin/bin/autoinstaller --service-mode --enable-xml-output --ssl-cert /usr/local/psa/admin/conf/httpsd.pem --branch release,stable --web-interface --with-ssl --disable-browser
  
  it means that Plesk Installer is running. In this case, it is required to wait until it is finished (up to 30 minutes). If the process is still active after 30 minutes, kill it manually using the resolution steps from this KB article.

Checking if a Plesk backup task is running

In your Linux terminal, run the command:

# plesk sbin pmmcli --get-tasks-list Backup | grep working
- No output means there are no active backup tasks.
- If an output like below is returned:
  
  CONFIG_TEXT: <working>
  </working>
  
  it means that some backup task is running. In this case, it is required to wait until it is finished.

How to remove Plesk backup files and their logs

Comments

7 comments

Marco Marsala March 19, 2019 09:35

https://IPADDRESS:8443/repair is 404 not found on all my servers.

0

Comment actions Permalink
Marco Marsala March 19, 2019 10:02 (Edited March 19, 2019 10:18)

This will break Media Uploader (error: "missing temporary dir") in all Wordpress sites on the server using PHP FPM (FastCGI is ok), php.ini unaltered.

0

Comment actions Permalink
Artyom Baranov March 19, 2019 10:46

@Marco Marsala,

Hi!

1) Plesk repair kit presents only on Plesk Onyx 17.8. Additionally, please check if your OS uses systemd init system (https://docs.plesk.com/en-US/onyx/administrator-guide/plesk-administration/repair-kit.79310/).

2) I can suppose that /tmp folder itself was accidentally removed. Please make sure that there is an asterisk in rm -rf /tmp/* when removing the content of /tmp

0

Comment actions Permalink
Marco Marsala March 19, 2019 11:06

I confirm /tmp was not removed. The issue happes with FPM and Wordpress 5.x only.

0

Comment actions Permalink
Anna Morozyuk March 20, 2019 12:03

@Marco Marsala, Hello there!

I was trying reproducing this issue on a test environments and different WordPress versions, however, have not reproduced. This is a really interesting case, that has a number of variables within it. Thus, we would like for this case to reach Technical Support in order to investigate it deeper. Please create a request according to this article: How to submit request to Plesk Support

0

Comment actions Permalink
Marnette Federis August 20, 2019 20:18

Was there ever a solution for this? I desperately need to clear some space, but I don't want it to impact my Wordpress website.

0

Comment actions Permalink
Julian Bonpland Mignaquy August 20, 2019 22:57

Hi @Marnette,

Certain temporary files are not managed by Plesk but by the OS. For that matter, we recommend applying the solution in this article and I also recommend using the following extension https://www.plesk.com/extensions/diskspace-usage-viewer/.

0

Comment actions Permalink