How to clear the Cargo cache?

Question

When I run cargo build, various libs get stored within the folder /usr/local/lib/rustlib/.

What is the correct way to clear these libs? I could rm these files manually, but would that be the right thing to do? I noticed that /usr/local/lib/rustlib/manifest is a file containing a list of the fill file paths of all the libs, and hence might be breaking something if I remove these files manually.

Sulfanilamide

Answer 1

I believe that manifest file is just for the built-in libraries, i.e. those distributed with rustc. cargo itself stores things in ~/.cargo (for the moment), if you do wish to just remove all the libraries then deleting that directory won't break anything.

If you're just wanting cargo to rebuild/update dependencies you can run cargo update.

Vaticinal

Thanks for pointing me to ~/.cargo, that is what I was looking for! – Sulfanilamide

keep the bin folder if you don't want to reinstall all that cool Rust tools you've installed ) – Manipular

In particular, by default this will remove the cargo executable itself too. – Francinefrancis

Answer 2

Install and run cargo-cache to clear the cache in the ~/.cargo folder:

cargo install cargo-cache
cargo cache -a

Kentish

error caused by "feature resolver is required" :sad_face: – Olnek

error: no such subcommand: cache – Sizzler

@Sizzler did you remember to install cargo-cache first? – Kentish

If you no longer have any need of any of the cargo crates, such as just wanting to compile a project and then freeing up the space afterward, the command to use is cargo-cache --remove-dir all (or cargo-cache -r all for short). – Torras

I found this useful when using dependencies with versions that cargo does not support. For example, Cargo will not download the correct dependency when you switch a dependency from 1.2.0-dev.1 to 1.2.0-dev.2. It doesn't respect semver "pre-release versions" (Cargo doesn't document this) semver "build metadata" (documented). – Earl

I ran into an issue with the cache that made me unable to install/build cargo-cache normally. What worked for me was to just update rust (rustup update) so it wouldn't use cached builds made with previous versions of rustc. This was only possible since I did not need to use a specific version of rustc, but it did help give me the peace of mind that I was not going to break something by manually deleting files. Afterwards, I was able to install cargo-cache and have it do a full cache reset. – Merilyn