Cleaning the nix store

Warning: You are reading an article on the deprecated unofficial wiki. For the up to date version of this article, see https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/Cleaning_the_nix_store.

Sometimes your store fills up the disk, but a simple

nix-store --gc

does not seem to clean all that much.

This usually means that you have some old collection roots that keep old versions of nixpkgs around.

Sometimes result files created by an ad-hoc nix-build bind a lot of resources, these can be found by running:

  nix-store --gc --print-roots | egrep -v "^(/nix/var|/run/\w+-system|\{memory|/proc)"

Additional Resources about cleaning up the nix-store:

• https://matthewrhone.dev/nixos-package-guide#cleanup-old-packages-user-wide
• https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Storage_optimization
• https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/8m1n3d/taking_out_the_trash/

There are multiple tools that can help with discovering gcroots and calculate the disk size:

• https://github.com/symphorien/nix-du
• https://github.com/utdemir/nix-tree
• https://github.com/cdepillabout/nix-query-tree-viewer
• https://github.com/craigmbooth/nix-visualize