EDIT 2025-09-29: Update from huggingface-cli to hf

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 hf cache delete. 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 cache scan 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.