cargo-sweep action

This action leverages the power of cargo-sweep to clean up stale build files from the target directory of a Rust project. Specifically, it uses the timestamp feature to delete unused build artifacts.

When would you use this?

This is most useful if you cache the target directory and use restore-keys to fallback on old caches. In these specific examples, old artifacts tend to pile up over time, causing caches to grow to gigabytes in size. You can use cargo-sweep to prune these old artifacts while keeping the used ones.

Quickstart

- name: Install Rust
  uses: dtolnay/rust-toolchain@stable

# Make sure to restore your cache before calling `cargo-sweep`.
- name: Cache build files
  uses: actions/cache@v4
  with:
    # You probably want to cache more files and use a more-detailed key. This is kept short for
    # brevity's sake.
    path: target
    key: my-job-${{ runner.os }}-${{ hashFiles('**/Cargo.lock') }}
    # `cargo-sweep` is only useful if you use restore keys.
    restore-keys: my-job-${{ runner.os }}-

- name: Sweep cache for stale files
  uses: BD103/cargo-sweep@v1

# Any artifacts used between `cargo-sweep` and the end of the job will be kept, the rest will be
# discarded.
- run: cargo build

For an all-in-one caching and sweeping solution, I highly recommend Leafwing-Studios/cargo-cache, which integrates with this action directly! Set sweep-cache: true.

Caching

This action, by default, caches the cargo-sweep binary so it does not need to build / download it again. You can disable this by setting use-cache: false in the inputs. Caching greatly speeds up the time of subsequent runs that do not use prebuilt binaries, but has little affect otherwise.

Prebuilt binaries

This repository automatically builds and hosts binaries of cargo-sweep, which you can inspect in build-cargo-sweep.yml. You can opt-in to downloading these binaries by setting use-prebuilt: true, which may drastically speed up runtimes compared to a clean cargo install. These binaries are built weekly for ubuntu-latest, windows-latest, and macos-latest, so you may not be able to use them on other platforms.

This was originally introduced when caching was not implemented, but as of v1.3 it has much less benefit. If your project is constantly running past Github's cache quota then you may want to enable prebuilt binaries, but in all other cases it is safer and nearly as fast to use caching instead.