cargo clean --recursive

[LeSnake04]

Problem

Many have a folder with their cargo projects that quickly becomes very big (10 GB+)

Currently users need to go into each project indiviually and run cargo clean to clear storage or use a script or tool that does it for them.

Proposed Solution

A recursive option for the clean subcommand would provide an easy native way to clean folders.

It should scan for projects in the current directory and then run the clean function on each of them.

Notes

No response

[epage]

At the moment, cargo has no multi-workspace support, so this would be a first. As such, the flag would need to make that clear and I don't think "recursive" would do that.

This also requires cargo correctly identifying all of the target directories that it recurses into.

Personally, I wonder if #11156 would be a better way for making it easy to clean up everything.

[StyMaar]

Personally, I wonder if #11156 would be a better way for making it easy to clean up everything.

That makes it easier to clean up everything, but on the flip side cargo clean would clean everything every time wouldn't it ?

[epage]

That makes it easier to clean up everything, but on the flip side cargo clean would clean everything every time wouldn't it ?

#11156 only makes it so all the target dirs are in the same directory, they are still distinct from each other. cargo metadata would still report a workspace-specific target dir and cargo clean would only clean the target dir for that specific workspace.

[LeSnake04]

I think --recursive would fit pretty well since nealy all gnu like cli tools use it as well.

And maybe it makes sense to implement --recursive into cargo globally.

Then the usage would look like this:

cargo --recursive clean

It would search in the current directory and then run the command on all the project founds. If no command specified, it would display all project found.

EDIT:I would also add

cargo --recursive-from ~/Code  clean

An alternative would be a cargo-recursive like cargo find (as reference to gnu find)

cargo find --exec clean

or

cargo find . --exec clean

this might be the easier and less breaking way compared to moving target

[LeSnake04]

@epage what do you think about handling it this way?

Instead of --recursive we could also use --find that takes an optional path, defaulting to the current dir.

Finding projects would be as easy as running WalkDir on the folder and filtering out all files named Cargo.toml

[LeSnake04]

I would also make a similar option named --members that apply the subcommand to all members of the current crate

Otherwise actions that are shared between members,like clean, would be executed on every single crate, even though it only needs to be executed once.

Also --members would be pretty useful to e.g. add dependencies to all members or running cargo tarpulin on all of them.

[epage]

--members sounds like the --workspace flag we have today.

One option is to develop cargo find as an external command, cargo-find, and experiment with the workflow and see what the adoption looks like.

[LeSnake04]

https://lib.rs/crates/cargo-recursive exists, but it doesn't look very popular. Maybe it makes sense to just make something that works for cleaning for now.