[question] cleanup huge CONAN_USER_HOME (dl directories?)

Hello, when I analyze my CONAN_USER_HOME directory, then I can find a lot of files which could actually be removed.

For some of my packages (which are both build from source or for some packages downloaded prebuilt), I can find following files:

• <conan_download_cache>/<hash>.tar.gz
• dl/export/conan_export.tgz
• dl/export/conan_sources.tgz
• dl/pkg/<hash>/conan_package.tar.gz
• export_source/ (which is actually the unpacked conan_sources.tgz)
• source/ (which is actually same as export_source/)
• (build/ (which is actually the same as source/ if not using no_copy_source=True))
• package/<hash>/ (which is actually the unpacked conan_package.tgz

Background: We always have to use exports_source to upload everything what we need alongside with the conanfile.py to the same remote artifactory. We need this to ensure that our packages always can be built from source in future (e.g. if a remote is mirrored, if the actual URL is not available anymore on github.com, …). Therefore our conan_sources.tgz may be very large. For Example: clang+llvm-13.0.0-x86_64-linux-gnu-ubuntu-20.04.tar.xz = 520MB (unpacked: 3.5GB)

Note regarding the download_cache <conan_download_cache>/<hash>.tar.gz (1.5GB): This file we do not need to consider for now, since it is of course our job to cleanup the download_cache from time to time…

In my CONAN_USER_HOME this conan package requires more space than expected (I would expect 3.5GB all in all).

• dl/export/conan_export.tgz 1kB
• dl/pkg/<hash>/conan_package.tar.gz 1.5GB
• export_source/ 1.5GB
• source/ 1.5GB (Note: This file we can remove in our source() after we have unpacked it)
• build/ 0kB (we use no_copy_source=True)
• package/<hash>/ 3.5GB

Is it a bug, that the dl/* files are not automatically removed after they have been unpacked?

What is the easiest way for now to cleanup all files in the conan cache which are actually not required anymore (especially the export_source, source, build and dl directories)?

Will following command make the conan cache corrupt?

cd ~/.conan/data
find . -mindepth 5 -maxdepth 5 -type d -name 'dl' -o -name 'build' -o -name 'source' -o -name 'export_source' -exec rm -rf {} +

[memsharded]

Is there a way to remove all cached packages except the ones required by a recipe/conanfile.py?

Not yet.

At some point in Conan 2.X, when the LRU cache metadata is managed, it will be possible to conan install one conanfile, and then removed everything that was not used in the last 5 minutes or something like that.

[IceflowRE]

Is there a way to remove all cached packages except the ones required by a recipe/conanfile.py?