makeclean

Removes generated and downloaded files from code projects to free up space.

Features:

• List, cleans and archives projects depending on how long you haven't touched them.
• Respects .gitignore files even outside Git repositories. Build tools often create a .gitignore file when initializing a new project, so this makes sure that the dependencies are not traversed even in case you have not initialized the Git repository yet.
• Supports .ignore files, which have the same semantics as .gitignore files and are supported by search tools such as ripgrep and The Silver Searcher.
• Ignores hidden directories.

Currently supports the following build tools:

• Cargo
• Elm
• Gradle
• Maven
• Mix
• NPM

Table of contents:

• Installation
• Usage
  • List projects
  • Clean projects
  • Clean + archive projects
  • Use case: automatically run for multiple project directories
• Hack it
• License

Installation

makeclean should work on Linux, MacOS and Windows. Only tested on Linux and Mac though.

Install using Cargo:

cargo install makeclean

Usage

Run makeclean --help to see all available options.

List projects

List all projects that are "stale", that is, have not been changed recently, under a given path, using --list/-l:

makeclean --list ~/projects

By default, a project is considered stale if there weren't any changed for at least a month. You can change this by using --min-stale/-m; for example, to consider all projects that have not been modified within the last 2 weeks:

makeclean --list --min-stale=2w ~/projects

Set --min-stale to zero to disable the check:

makeclean --list --min-stale=0 ~/projects

You can also filter by build tool using --type/-t:

makeclean --list --type npm ~/projects

Clean projects

By default, makeclean looks for any projects that haven't been touched for a month, and offers to clean them:

makeclean ~/projects

Use --dry-run/-n to see what would happen, without actually deleting anything:

makeclean --dry-run ~/projects

If you run makeclean in a script and don't want the prompt, you can pass --yes to proceed automatically:

makeclean --yes ~/projects

Clean + archive projects

If you also want to archive the projects after cleaning them up, pass --archive. For example, the following command would replace the contents of ~/projects/foo with ~/projects/foo.tar.xz, after cleaning it:

makeclean --archive ~/projects/foo

Note that while --archive also considers cleaned projects, it still respects --min-stale. If makeclean doesn't find your project but you think it should, try again with the environment variable RUST_LOG set to trace, e.g., RUST_LOG=trace makeclean --archive ~/projects/foo. You should see a hint as to why the project was not considered. If the logs don't tell you what's going on, please consider creating a GitHub issue.

To restore the project, use tar (which is probably already installed on your system):

cd ~/projects/foo
tar -xaf foo.tar.xz && rm foo.tar.xz

Use case: automatically run for multiple project directories

Let's say you have a list of directories where you know you'll create a lot of one-off projects you don't need to keep around in a ready state. You can use the following command to automically process them:

$ cat playground.txt
~/code/rust-playground
~/code/elm-playground
~/code/flutter-playground

$ # Replacing newlines with zero-bytes is needed to process whitespace correctly without fiddling around with IFS...
$ xargs -0 -n 1 makeclean --min-stale=7d --yes < <(tr \\n \\0 <playground.txt)

Hack it

Check out the documentation on crates.io. PRs welcome!

License

MIT. Any contributions are assumed MIT-licensed as well.