jzbor/nix-sweep

Utility to clean up old Nix profile generations and left-over garbage collection roots

Source code at GitHub https://github.com/jzbor/nix-sweep

{
  "createdAt": "2025-02-10T16:15:56Z",
  "defaultBranch": "main",
  "description": "Utility to clean up old Nix profile generations and left-over garbage collection roots",
  "fullName": "jzbor/nix-sweep",
  "homepage": "",
  "language": "Rust",
  "name": "nix-sweep",
  "pushedAt": "2025-11-10T22:07:00Z",
  "stargazersCount": 55,
  "topics": [
    "nix",
    "nix-flakes",
    "nixos"
  ],
  "updatedAt": "2025-11-21T14:36:16Z",
  "url": "https://github.com/jzbor/nix-sweep"
}

nix-sweep

nix-sweep aims to provide a nice interface for cleaning up old Nix profile generations and left-over garbage collection roots.

nix-sweep demo

Size Calculations

Calculating the size of the Nix paths may take a few moments, especially on older hardware. If you want to avoid that overhead you can use --no-size to skip size calculations.

Presets

nix-sweep allows you to create presets for clean out criteria, that can then be used with nix-sweep cleanout.

Preset configs are stored as TOML files. If a preset is present in multiple of those files, then the ones further down in the list override ones further up. The following locations are checked for preset files:

/etc/nix-sweep/presets.toml
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/nix-sweep/presets.toml/~/.config/nix-sweep/presets.toml
configuration files passed via -C/--config

Example:

[housekeeping]
keep-min = 10
remove-older = 14d
interactive = true
gc = false

Presets can be used with the -p (--preset) flag:

nix-sweep -p housekeeping system
nix-sweep -p only-remove-really-old system
nix-sweep -p nuke-everything system

Contributing

Code contributions (pull request) are currently not accepted. If you have any feedback, ideas or bugreports feel free to open a new issue