Currenty while working with DDEV on Debian, I ran into a problem (re)starting a DDEV project.

The message I got was:


Failed to start project for custom command: ddev-router failed to become ready; log=, err=health check timed out after 1m0s: labels map[com.docker.compose.oneoff:False com.docker.compose.service:ddev-router] timed out without becoming healthy, status=, detail= ddev-router:starting
Troubleshoot this with these commands:
- docker logs ddev-router
- docker inspect --format "{{ json .State.Health }}" ddev-router | docker run -i --rm ddev/ddev-utilities jq -r


The troubleshooting command delivered:


ERR Cannot start the provider *file.Provider error="error adding file watcher: no space left on device"


Seems to be a rather clear message ... but there was no lack of space on the hard disk.

Searching a bit brought me to this article on Stackoverflow.

The problem was about the fs.inotify.max_user_watches limit being too low.

Setting fs.inotify.max_user_watches to 524288 solved the problem.

These commands will set the value permanent:

echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf
sudo sysctl -p # re-read config


Of course 524288 is not a fixed value, you can adjust to your liking as long as it is above your current limit.

The value is usually dynamically determined by available RAM, see https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/92890123749bafc317bbfacbe0a62ce08d78efb7

So setting it to high may introduce other problems, be aware of that.