Which files to backup in .julia?

General Usage
1

Hi everyone,

I regularly backup my WSL2 home directory, and I realized that the .julia folder is rather big. Is there any parts of this folder which I can skip ?

Many thanks,
Have a nice day,

P.S: Here the folder size stats:

$ du -sh .julia/* | sort -h
4.0K    .julia/clones
4.0K    .julia/datadeps
80K     .julia/environments
112K    .julia/logs
8.1M    .julia/scratchspaces
9.4M    .julia/registries
631M    .julia/packages
991M    .julia/juliaup
3.0G    .julia/artifacts
7.7G    .julia/compiled
1 Like
2

I only backup .julia/dev. Because that’s where files reside that I edited. I think of all the other folders in .julia as just caches that Julia can quickly recreate from scratch when you instantiate your projects.

In fact I define the environment variable JULIA_PKG_DEVDIR to point to a location that is backed up, and I point JULIA_DEPOT_PATH and JULIAUP_DEPOT_PATH to a location that is not.

6 Likes
3

Well, to have a backup of .julia/environments is also a good idea. And a backup of your startup.jl file, if you are using it.

8 Likes
4

I barely use .julia/environments. I always call julia --project to use it with a local per-project environment.

2 Likes
5

Many thanks for all your answers. I think I will explicitely exclude the big dirs, but include in my backups all the other stuff.

6

If you don’t want to erase the whole .julia folder, but still need to clean things up every now and then, use GitHub - giordano/PkgCleanup.jl: Cleanup unused Julia environments and artifacts

I wish Julia itself had a ] cleanup command, and that juliaup erased all artifacts that were built in versions that are no longer installed.

Related: How to cleanup artifacts folder

3 Likes
7

Not yet but I will definitely have a look on PkgCleanup. Thanks.