Clearing WSL Disk Space

So you use WSL and are continuously losing space on your precious SSD. The following steps may help you recover some of that.

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Tools

Firstly some tips on how to see what exactly is eating up your gigabytes.

Use:

du -h --max-depth=1 | sort -rh

to list how much space each folder is taking up within a directory, sorted in descending order.

For example, here is the output for my ~/.cache folder:

~/.cache
❯ du -h --max-depth=1 | sort -rh
28G     .
18G     ./pypoetry
7.7G    ./pip
521M    ./tortoise
485M    ./ms-playwright
478M    ./pnpm
381M    ./mozilla
107M    ./pre-commit
47M     ./typescript
7.6M    ./yarn
1.7M    ./jedi
1.6M    ./deno
1.3M    ./omf
416K    ./fontconfig
180K    ./tooling
72K     ./torch
36K     ./quarto
32K     ./matplotlib
32K     ./librosa
28K     ./huggingface
20K     ./giget
16K     ./com.vercel.cli
16K     ./checkpoint-nodejs
12K     ./black
8.0K    ./pylint
8.0K    ./dconf
4.0K    ./starship

Heuristics

Some things to look out for!

1. Nuke ~/.cache immediately. Most of your tooling likely has downloaded many large files within this directory.

2. .venv or venv folders within your Python projects. These folders contain all the packages you pip install / poetry add. Things like torch & transformers take up a ton of space, especially the the additional packages installed for CUDA compatibility.

3. node_modules folders within your NodeJS projects. Same as (2). Btw, use pnpm.

Still don’t see any increase in space?

Restart, or do this to refresh the mounted WSL virtual disk.

wsl --terminate ubuntu

# this should spawn another shell, ie: the diskpart CLI
diskpart

DISKPART> select vdisk file=%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Packages\CanonicalGroupLimited.UbuntuonWindows_79rhkp1fndgsc\LocalState\ext4.vhdx
DISKPART> compact vdisk

Now, you should see the space savings reflected in your file explorer.