We define and study Musielak-Orlicz-Sobolev spaces with zero boundary values on any metric space endowed with a Borel regular measure. We extend many classical results, including completeness, lattice properties and removable sets, to Musielak-Orlicz-Sobolev spaces on metric measure spaces. We give sufficient conditions which guarantee that a Sobolev function can be approximated by Lipschitz continuous functions vanishing outside an open set. These conditions are based on Hardy type inequalities....