Expand logical volumes in Ubuntu

Expanding a logical volume on Ubuntu is fairly easy but it is a process that involves a few steps. Let’s try to expand a logical volume in Ubuntu 22.04.

It’s mandatory that we have physical space available first. This means for example that if we are running Ubuntu on a virtual machine, we have to expand the virtual disk first.

To resize the logical volume we need to know the name of our logical volume. To check that we can run the command df -H. We should see the following output:

Filesystem                         Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs                              407M  1.8M  405M   1% /run
/dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv   20G  9.5G  9.5G  51% /
tmpfs                              2.1G     0  2.1G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs                              5.3M     0  5.3M   0% /run/lock
/dev/sda2                          2.1G  136M  1.8G   8% /boot
overlay                             20G  9.5G  9.5G  51% /var/lib/docker/overlay2/[...]/merged
tmpfs                              407M  4.1k  407M   1% /run/user/1000

Then you can run the following command to expand the logical volume to the maximum size possible given the space available on our disk:

lvextend -l +100%FREE /dev/ubuntu-vg/ubuntu-lv

Then finally we have to expand the file system to actually be able to use that new space that we have assigned to our logical volume:

resize2fs /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv

Now you should be able to see that the available space for /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv has increased by running df -H again.