How to clear gradle cache?

Question

I'm trying to use Android Studio, and the first time I boot it up, it takes like 45 MINUTES to compile... If I don't quit the application, it is okay - each subsequent compilation/running the app will take around 45 seconds.

I've tried to check some of my caches: there's a .gradle/caches folder in my home directory, and it's contains 123 MB.

There's also a .gradle folder in my project folder... one of the taskArtifacts was like 200 MB. I'm scared to just randomly nuke them both. What parts of the folders are safe to delete?

Is there a better explanation for why my Android Studio is taking forever to run the gradle assemble task upon first time loading the application?

Do I also have to clear the intellij cache too?

Answer 1

Gradle cache is located at

• On Windows: %USERPROFILE%\.gradle\caches
• On Mac / UNIX: ~/.gradle/caches/

You can browse to these directory and manually delete it or run

rm -r $HOME/.gradle/caches/ 

on UNIX system. Run this command will also force to download dependencies.

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UPDATE

Clear the Android build cache of current project

NOTE: Android Studio's File > Invalidate Caches / Restart doesn't clear the Android build cache, so you'll have to clean it separately.

On Windows:

gradlew cleanBuildCache 

On Mac or UNIX:

./gradlew cleanBuildCache 

UPDATE 2

This article Put your Android Studio on a diet gives more details on Android Studio caches

Answer 2

As @Bradford20000 pointed out in the comments, there might be a gradle.properties file as well as global gradle scripts located under $HOME/.gradle. In such case special attention must be paid when deleting the content of this directory.

The .gradle/caches directory holds the Gradle build cache. So if you have any error about build cache, you can delete it.

The --no-build-cache option will run gradle without the build cache.

Daemon on MS Windows If you're on Windows, you'll need to kill the daemon before it allows you to clear those directories. See Kill all Gradle Daemons Regardless Version? for more info.