Change /tmp mount for AVD installation in IntelliJ IDEA

After a day struggling to make space for /tmp just for installing a new system image for Android Virtual Device, right before I gave up, this magical thought came to my mind: why not change /tmp mount to somewhere more spacious: /home/<user>/tmp!

Android system image installation in IntelliJ / Android Studio is straightforward, supposedly. Choose a device configuration, select an existing image, or download a new image in my case, and after a short wait, it shall be done.

However, IntelliJ has been failing me in the middle step: download extract and install that Android system image. It says, not enough space, and indeed, my /tmp which resides in / root directory partition was filling up to the brim. Without wanting to risk myself in improperly configuring the image, I tried my way to slim down my / usage, increasing free space from 3GB to 5GB, uninstalling a few obsolete packages etc, Android system image still refused to give way.

Then I thought, how about to change the tmp directory to /home/<user>/tmp where I have ample free space?

A few answers on Stackoverflow [1] says exporting -Djava.io.tmpdir=<dir> flag would alter the tmp folder location for JVM which runs IntelliJ. I tried, and I could read from the console that IntelliJ recognized that. However, at the process to add the Android system image, it still resorted to the original /tmp folder. As download goes, I saw the free space of /diminishing, and by the time of extraction, all space’s gone, again.

That sucks. There must be a solution, I thought.

After a few rounds of furious googling, the idea of mount caught my eyes.

To cut things short, the lines here are telling the Linux system: I want to use /home/<user>/tmp for /tmp:

Note: the common permission for tmp folder is 1777 (ref [Server Fault] & [Unix & Linux Stack Exchange]). Also this change to tmp folder is not persistent, meaning it WILL go away upon reboot.

With this, finally, peace.