Hi all,
During my time spend to get familiare with ESPHome i noticed that plenty of old files remains in the foldert structure.
f.i.
/config/esphome/build/ ““old files”” remains with in them more folders and files?
I use file editor.
For me it has no sence to have these old files in the system.
To delete them is a hugh job and time consuming.
Is there a more elegant way to delete these folders and files?
In the doc,s i cant find.
Like to hear.
Kind regards ilioss
This files are cached for a reason. It will speed up the building after a change in your esphome yaml drastically.
You also will avoid to re-download lot’s of files.
So instead building totally “new” (from scratch) which can take couple of minutes (and downloading lots of platformio dependencies) a rebuild with already cached files typically only takes ~10 seconds (all depending of the used hardware for building).
Anyway it doesn’t occupy a lot of space and there should be no need to delete the files because they will not grow by itself (only if you add new components to your yaml).
I think the dashboard only features a “clean build” button and no “clean” (only) function.
I have done this and can confirm it works fine
You might also delete the whole esphome (dashboard) addon (and only backup/save your yaml’s locally) if you need the space.
Your esphome nodes will continue working normally with home assistant. The esphome (dashboard) addon is only for deploying and changing esphome nodes.
Hello Holdestmade,
Thanks for you contribution. I will look into it.
Howeever is your video based on windows? I had a quick look and the rspi didnt show up. Windows file manager. Must be linux i presume?
Keeping files in cach ok by me. But files each and every time uploaded in entities is beside the cach purposes. This is contra having files in cach to my opinion.
Thats wy i wonder why all these files are in the system.
It has sebce if you have a dadycated file wher you can read reguraly needed files which will not change .
For now I delet the files manualy and will be very hesistat to make test files.
This is what we called system polution.
Kind regards ilioss
Note:
system clean-up is nor removing the obsolete and not in use files.
Really? rm -rf is very quick isn’t it?
For me re-downloading them is much more time consuming so I just have them cached locally 
I don’t bother at all and actually for flash storage it’s even “healthier” to keep the files instead of rewriting them (the same files) permanently 
Thanks to write amplification you might be able to kill a flash storage very fast by unnecessarily deleting files just to rewrite them again 
Not my video, it works using Samba. Dead easy
To all,
Thanks for the help.
Indeed Samba wil do the trick.
As most of the casses RTFM.
Thank any way.
Regards ilioss