How to Stop the Ubuntu ‘Apport’ Daemon from Creating Core Dumps

The Silent Disk Eater

Ubuntu includes a crash reporting service called Apport. When a background service or an application crashes on your system, Apport intercepts the crash, generates a detailed crash report, and often creates a massive “core dump” file—a complete snapshot of the application’s memory at the exact moment it failed. These core dumps are saved in the /var/crash/ directory.

While core dumps are invaluable for C++ developers and maintainers debugging segmentation faults, they are completely useless to the average user or server administrator. If a memory-heavy database like MySQL crashes, the resulting core dump could be several gigabytes in size. If a service enters a crash loop, Apport can quickly fill up your entire root partition with crash logs, bringing the whole server to a grinding halt. You can disable Apport to prevent this.

How to Disable the Apport Daemon

You can turn off Apport entirely by editing its primary configuration file.

1. Open your Ubuntu Terminal (or connect via SSH).
2. Use a text editor like nano to open the Apport configuration file with root privileges:

sudo nano /etc/default/apport

3. Look for the line that says enabled=1.
4. Change the 1 to a 0, so the line looks exactly like this:

enabled=0

5. Save the file and exit the editor (in nano, press Ctrl + O, Enter, then Ctrl + X).
6. Finally, stop the currently running service so the changes take effect immediately:

sudo systemctl stop apport

Apport is now disabled. If an application crashes in the future, it will simply fail silently and write a standard error line to syslog, rather than generating massive, disk-consuming core dump files in the background.