I’m currently working on a project that made me download a bunch of models from Hugging Face to compare their performance. At some point, I wanted to clean up my Hugging Face cache and delete the ones that clearly weren’t working for my use case.

At first, I was just listing the models in my cache directory (by default it’s .cache/huggingface/hub) and manually deleting folders one by one.

Then I found out about huggingface-cli delete-cache. It lets you interactively pick which models to delete, shows when you last used them, and tells you how much space they take up. There’s also a scan-cache command if you just want to check what’s in there without deleting anything.

Another nice detail: it shows different revisions of a model, so you can delete just the ones you don’t need instead of wiping the whole thing.

I don’t know all the details yet, but this definitely feels like a better—and probably safer—way to clean your Hugging Face cache. You can read more about the Hugging Face cache in the documentation.