How to manage 18 GB /var/log/journal on HASSOS

Installation
1

I recently setup pulse to monitor my containers and VMs and happened to notice the large size of /var/log/journal being reported by pulse.

Screenshot 2025-11-17 130603
Screenshot 2025-11-17 1306031511×606 42.6 KB

unfortunately journalctl is not found on home assistant os
Also of note, as of 2025.11 " On supervised installations (such as Home Assistant OS), the logs are sent to systemd journal, in addition to the Home Assistant log file home-assistant.log . This PR stops logging to the home-assistant.log in order to reduce the ammount of writes to disk." So this is not home assistant logs, this is “os” logs so no amount of ha core log clear is gonna fix this, right?

any help is appreciated.

2

Not true. You just need the right access.
I don’t trust pulse here. Follow that link and then check this

journalctl --disk-usage

For comparison

# journalctl --disk-usage
Archived and active journals take up 481.1M in the file system.

As seen through the SSH addon

# du -hs /var/log/journal/
481.1M  /var/log/journal/

Maybe pulse does something like this? See if this results in the same value from your picture

df -hT /var/log/journal/

HAOS is configured to store 500M of logs.

If you want to check your used space in detail see here.

3

1000% correct. I greatly appreciate your assistance and thank you for sharing. Learned a lot from your instructions.
So I do not need to be concerned with

/ # df -hT /var/log/journal/
Filesystem           Type            Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda8            ext4           30.8G     18.6G     10.9G  63% /mnt/data