- Learn how to clear pip’s cache folder
- 1. Use the pip cache remove command
- 2. Use the pip cache purge
- Take your skills to the next level ⚡️
- About
- Search
- Tags
- Caching#
- What is cached#
- HTTP responses#
- Locally built wheels#
- Where is the cache stored#
- Pip Clear Cache
- Pip cache command
- Pip cache dir
- Pip show cache info
- Pip show filenames and packages in the cache
- Pip remove package from cache
- Pip clean cache
- Pip Install package without cache
- Manually purge pip cache
- Closing
- About the author
- John Otieno
- Caching#
- What is cached#
- HTTP responses#
- Locally built wheels#
- Where is the cache stored#
- Clear pip Cache
- Related
Learn how to clear pip’s cache folder
After installing packages to your system, the pip package installer keeps a copy of the installed packages in the cache folder.
This is useful because the next time you want to install the same package, pip can just retrieve the cache instead of downloading the package again from the internet.
But pip’s cache folder easily grow in size, as you can see when running the pip cache info command:
As you can see in the example output above, the cache size has reached 3GB in size. The packages stored in the cache folder will never be removed by pip.
- Clear a specific package using pip cache remove
- Clear all cached packages using pip cache purge
Let’s see examples of how to use these options in practice.
1. Use the pip cache remove command
The pip cache remove command is used to remove a specific package from your pip’s cache folder.
To see all packages available in the cache folder, you need to run the pip cache list command:
You can remove a specific package by running the command pip cache remove as shown below:
The cache for the sklearn package will be removed from pip.
If you want to clean all files from the cache, then you can use the command below.
2. Use the pip cache purge
The pip cache purge command is used to clear all files stored in pip’s cache folder.
Here’s an example of running the command:
As you can see, running the pip cache purge command cleans the cache folder completely.
Cleaning the pip cache folder is safe, but please make sure that you’re not currently running an installation process or you might encounter some errors.
If you have limited disk space, pip also allows you to install packages without saving the build files in the cache folder, so you might want to try that.
I hope this tutorial is helpful. See you in other tutorials! 🙌
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Caching#
pip provides an on-by-default caching, designed to reduce the amount of time spent on duplicate downloads and builds.
What is cached#
HTTP responses#
This cache functions like a web browser cache. When making any HTTP request, pip will first check its local cache to determine if it has a suitable response stored for that request which has not expired. If it does then it returns that response and doesn’t re-download the content. If it has a response stored but it has expired, then it will attempt to make a conditional request to refresh the cache which will either return an empty response telling pip to simply use the cached item (and refresh the expiration timer) or it will return a whole new response which pip can then store in the cache. While this cache attempts to minimize network activity, it does not prevent network access altogether. If you want a local install solution that circumvents accessing PyPI, see Installing from local packages .
Locally built wheels#
pip attempts to use wheels from its local wheel cache whenever possible. This means that if there is a cached wheel for the same version of a specific package name, pip will use that wheel instead of rebuilding the project. When no wheels are found for a source distribution, pip will attempt to build a wheel using the package’s build system. If the build is successful, this wheel is added to the cache and used in subsequent installs for the same package version. Wheels built from source distributions provided to pip as a direct path (such as pip install . ) are not cached across runs, though they may be reused within the same pip execution.
Changed in version 20.0: pip now caches wheels when building from an immutable Git reference (i.e. a commit hash).
Where is the cache stored#
Caution The exact filesystem structure of pip’s cache’s contents is considered to be an implementation detail and may change between any two versions of pip.
Pip Clear Cache
Pip is the most popular and versatile package installer for Python. It offers a command-line utility that allows you to manage Python packages easily.
Using pip, you can perform actions such as downloading, installing, updating, and uninstalling packages with simple commands.
Pip uses a caching mechanism that allows you to download and install Python packages faster. It works by storing a cache of the downloaded packages on the local wheel.
The caching mechanism allows pip to improve the download and installation of the packages. This is because pip does not need to download already existing packages.
In some cases, pip may not need to redownload a package when updating if it already exists in the cache.
This tutorial will discuss how to work with the pip cache, how to manage the pip cache using various commands, and how to clear it when you need to start afresh.
Pip cache command
In the recent version of pip (i.e., Pip 20.2 and above), you can use the pip cache command to manage the pip cache.
Let us discuss each action below:
Pip cache dir
This command allows you to get the directory where the pip cache is stored on the target system.
The command should return the directory where the pip cache is located. Example output on Windows and Linux is as shown below:
Pip show cache info
You can use the pip cache info command as shown to get information about the pip cache:
$ pip cache info
Package index page cache location: /home/debian/.cache/pip/http
Package index page cache size: 0 bytes
Number of HTTP files: 0
Wheels location: /home/debian/.cache/pip/wheels
Wheels size: 0 bytes
Number of wheels: 0
The command should return a sample output as:
Pip show filenames and packages in the cache
Pip provides us with the command to view the filenames and directories stored in the cache.
Pip remove package from cache
To remove a specific package from the cache, you can use the remove action as:
The command allows you to specify a specific pattern to match a particular package.
NOTE that the specified pattern can be a glob expression or the name of a target package.
For example, to remove all the files from the cache, you can run:
NOTE that the command will remove all the files from the cache. Be careful if you do not wish to clear your cache.
Pip clean cache
You may need to reset the pip cache to default in some instances. For that, you can use the purge action as:
Pip Install package without cache
If you want to install a package without looking up the file in the pip cache, we can use the –no-cache-dir.
For example, to install TensorFlow without looking up the pip cache, run the command:
The command above should force pip to redownload the package even if it is stored in the cache.
Manually purge pip cache
If you use an older version of pip and have no access to the pip cache command, you can clear the pip cache by manually removing the cache directory.
Closing
This tutorial taught you the fundamentals of working with the pip cache. We also covered two methods to clear the pip cache depending on your installed pip version.
About the author
John Otieno
My name is John and am a fellow geek like you. I am passionate about all things computers from Hardware, Operating systems to Programming. My dream is to share my knowledge with the world and help out fellow geeks. Follow my content by subscribing to LinuxHint mailing list
Caching#
pip provides an on-by-default caching, designed to reduce the amount of time spent on duplicate downloads and builds.
What is cached#
HTTP responses#
This cache functions like a web browser cache. When making any HTTP request, pip will first check its local cache to determine if it has a suitable response stored for that request which has not expired. If it does then it returns that response and doesn’t re-download the content. If it has a response stored but it has expired, then it will attempt to make a conditional request to refresh the cache which will either return an empty response telling pip to simply use the cached item (and refresh the expiration timer) or it will return a whole new response which pip can then store in the cache. While this cache attempts to minimize network activity, it does not prevent network access altogether. If you want a local install solution that circumvents accessing PyPI, see Installing from local packages .
Locally built wheels#
pip attempts to use wheels from its local wheel cache whenever possible. This means that if there is a cached wheel for the same version of a specific package name, pip will use that wheel instead of rebuilding the project. When no wheels are found for a source distribution, pip will attempt to build a wheel using the package’s build system. If the build is successful, this wheel is added to the cache and used in subsequent installs for the same package version. Wheels built from source distributions provided to pip as a direct path (such as pip install . ) are not cached across runs, though they may be reused within the same pip execution.
Changed in version 20.0: pip now caches wheels when building from an immutable Git reference (i.e. a commit hash).
Where is the cache stored#
Caution The exact filesystem structure of pip’s cache’s contents is considered to be an implementation detail and may change between any two versions of pip.
Clear pip Cache
The pip has a caching mechanism that stores downloaded Python packages and locally built wheels. It allows speeding up package installation process because less amount of time is spent for downloading and building duplicates. There might be a case, that the pip don’t update the package to the latest version because it retrieved from the cache. This tutorial shows how to clear pip cache.
Since pip 20.1, the pip cache command can be used for managing the pip cache. The purge argument allows clearing all cache.
On Linux, the pip cache also stored in the /root/.cache/pip directory. To delete it, execute a command with sudo privileges:
In versions prior to pip 20.1, delete the cache directory manually.
rd /s /q "%LocalAppData%\pip\cache"
sudo rm -rf /root/.cache/pip rm -rf ~/.cache/pip
Related
Metadata provides additional information about dataset in Kaggle. It includes elements such as description, title.