cargo-sweep

May 26, 2026 · View on GitHub

⚠️⚠️ Warning: cargo-sweep is currently unmaintained. ⚠️⚠️

The project has issues and is lacking a dedicated maintainer to contribute and/or review contributions from others.

If you're looking for an alternative, check cargo-clean-all.

If you want to discuss the possibility of a handover, reach out to one of these two previous maintainers:

  1. @jyn514 ("jyn" in the Rust-Lang's Zulip)
  2. @marcospb19 (contact info here)

Or open an issue.

cargo-sweep

cargo-sweep is a Cargo subcommand for deleting old or unused build artifacts from target/ without doing a full cargo clean.

It is useful when you want to:

  • shrink large target/ directories
  • avoid bloated CI caches
  • clean many Rust projects at once

Why use it?

cargo clean removes everything, cargo-sweep lets you clean more selectively.

For example, you can remove artifacts:

  • older than a number of days
  • not built by currently installed toolchains
  • until a target/ directory drops below a size limit

Install

cargo install cargo-sweep

After installation, use it as a Cargo subcommand:

cargo sweep --help

Quick examples

Clean artifacts older than 30 days in the current project:

cargo sweep --time 30

Preview what would be deleted:

cargo sweep --dry-run --time 30

Clean artifacts not built by currently installed Rust toolchains:

cargo sweep --installed

Keep only artifacts for specific toolchains:

cargo sweep --toolchains stable,nightly

Shrink target/ until it is below 10 GiB:

cargo sweep --maxsize 10GiB

Clean everything in a specific project:

cargo sweep --all path/to/project

Recursively sweep all Cargo projects under a directory:

cargo sweep --recursive --time 30 path/to/workspace-root

Timestamp workflow

If you want to keep only artifacts used after a certain point in time:

cargo sweep --stamp

# run builds, tests, benches, etc.

cargo sweep --file

This writes a timestamp marker, then later removes artifacts older than that marker.

Toolchain behavior

In a rustup environment, cargo-sweep can identify artifacts from installed toolchains.

If rustup is unavailable, it falls back to invoking rustc directly.

Help

For full usage:

cargo sweep --help

Standalone binary help:

cargo-sweep --help

Alternatives