Disable automatic Pkg Garbage Collection

oxinabox · October 2, 2023, 8:27am

Once upon a time Pkg didn’t ever delete old versions of packages that were no longer in use.
Now it periodically does so automatically when doing other operations.
I would like that to stop, because I have so much hard-drive space.
Even the fractional chance of me needing it again is worth keeping it around.

How do I disable this?
I assume there is some method i need to monkey-patch, as i can’t find an environment variable in the docs.

giordano · October 2, 2023, 10:16am

I don’t think there’s a public way to do that at the moment:

github.com

JuliaLang/Pkg.jl/blob/3960c692bd4dd2b2eafc7699e8d0744f90756812/src/Pkg.jl#L781


      
              path = Base.locate_package(pkgid)
              path === nothing && return nothing
              return abspath(path, "..", "..", paths...)
          end
          
          ###########
          # AUTO GC #
          ###########
          
          const DEPOT_ORPHANAGE_TIMESTAMPS = Dict{String,Float64}()
          const _auto_gc_enabled = Ref{Bool}(true)
          function _auto_gc(ctx::Types.Context; collect_delay::Period = Day(7))
              if !_auto_gc_enabled[]
                  return
              end
          
              # If we don't know the last time this depot was GC'ed (because this is the
              # first time we've looked this session), or it looks like we might want to
              # collect; let's go ahead and hit the filesystem to find the mtime of the
              # `orphaned.toml` file, which should tell us how long since the last time
              # we GC'ed.

You can do Pkg._auto_gc_enabled[] = false, but that’s not reliable across different versions.

essenciary · October 4, 2023, 8:20am

Actually the problem can be more serious and a public API to set this would come in handy.

We had a scenario where we’d deploy an image with preinstalled Julia packates to create server instances in a cluster. As the image would get older, the auto_gc would kick in and introduce quite significant delays in the provisioning/startup time of the new instances.

We hacked it by using Pkg._auto_gc_enabled[] = false which worked (Julia 1.9 and 1.10).

pfitzseb · October 4, 2023, 11:48am