deepclean 🧹

A fast, parallel tool to clean Rust projects and remove unused dependencies

Why deepclean?

Rust projects can accumulate gigabytes of build artifacts in target/ directories. When you have multiple projects or workspaces, manually cleaning them is tedious and time-consuming. Plus, unused dependencies bloat your Cargo.toml and slow down builds.

deepclean solves this by:

• 🚀 Cleaning multiple projects in parallel - Save time with concurrent cleaning
• 🎯 Smart workspace detection - Automatically finds all Cargo projects
• 🧹 Removes unused dependencies - Keep your Cargo.toml clean
• ⚡ Fast and efficient - Built in Rust for maximum performance

Quick Start

Installation

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/yingkitw/deepclean.git
cd deepclean

# Install as a cargo plugin
cargo install --path .

# Now use it!
cargo deepclean

Note: Make sure ~/.cargo/bin is in your PATH.

Basic Usage

# Clean current directory and all subdirectories
cargo deepclean

# Clean a specific directory
cargo deepclean /path/to/projects

# Preview what would be cleaned (dry run)
cargo deepclean --dry-run

# Only clean projects above 100MB
cargo deepclean --min-size 100MB

# Check for unused dependencies
cargo deepclean --clean-deps

# Remove unused dependencies (automatically checks first)
cargo deepclean --remove-deps

Features

• ✅ Parallel processing - Clean multiple projects simultaneously
• ✅ Smart detection - Uses cargo-metadata for accurate workspace detection
• ✅ Dependency cleaning - Find and remove unused dependencies (built-in detection)
• ✅ Size filtering - Only clean projects above a certain size
• ✅ Progress bars - See what's being cleaned in real-time
• ✅ Dry-run mode - Preview changes before applying them
• ✅ Exclude patterns - Skip specific directories
• ✅ JSON output - Machine-readable output for automation

Options

Option	Description
-j, --jobs <N>	Number of parallel jobs (default: CPU count)
-e, --exclude <PATTERN>	Exclude directories matching pattern (can use multiple times)
--dry-run	Preview mode (doesn't actually clean)
--min-size <SIZE>	Only clean projects above this size (e.g., "100MB", "1GB")
--clean-deps	Check for unused dependencies
--remove-deps	Remove unused dependencies (requires cargo-remove)
-v, --verbose	Verbose output
--json	Output results as JSON

Requirements

• Rust toolchain
• Cargo

Optional: Dependency Removal

To remove unused dependencies, install cargo-edit:

cargo install cargo-edit

Note: Dependency detection is built-in and doesn't require external tools! The tool parses Cargo.toml and searches your source code to find unused dependencies.

Examples

Clean Everything

cargo deepclean

Clean Only Large Projects

cargo deepclean --min-size 500MB

Find Unused Dependencies

cargo deepclean --clean-deps

Remove Unused Dependencies

cargo deepclean --remove-deps

Exclude Specific Directories

cargo deepclean --exclude "**/target/debug" --exclude "**/node_modules"

Parallel Cleaning with Custom Jobs

cargo deepclean -j 8

How It Works

1. Discovery: Recursively finds all Cargo projects using cargo-metadata
2. Filtering: Optionally filters by size or exclude patterns
3. Cleaning: Removes target/ directories in parallel
4. Dependency Analysis: Parses Cargo.toml and searches source code for unused dependencies
5. Removal: Uses cargo-remove to clean up unused dependencies

Performance

deepclean is built in Rust for maximum performance:

• Parallel execution across all CPU cores
• Efficient directory traversal
• Minimal memory footprint

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Feel free to open issues or submit pull requests.

License

Apache-2.0

Repository

https://github.com/yingkitw/deepclean