What is ~/.cache/uv on Mac, and is it safe to delete?

Where it is

What it is

uv is a fast package and project manager for Python. It keeps downloaded wheels, source distributions and the wheels it builds from them in a cache at ~/.cache/uv, and reuses them across all your projects and virtual environments.

It grows with every package version you install. Large scientific and machine learning packages take up most of the room.

The Python versions and command-line tools that uv installs are not in the cache. They live in ~/.local/share/uv, and clearing the cache does not remove them.

How big it gets

Often several hundred MB to several GB, and more if you install large machine learning packages.

How to clear it by hand

1. Make sure no uv command is running.
2. Run the command below. It removes every entry in the cache.
3. For a lighter clean, uv cache prune removes only entries that are no longer used and keeps the rest.
4. To see where the cache is on your Mac, run uv cache dir.

uv cache clean

What happens afterwards

The next time you install or sync a project, uv downloads its packages again, so that run is slower and needs the network. Existing virtual environments normally keep working.

How Diskzy handles it

Diskzy lists the uv cache in the Clean up tab and ticks it, as it does the pip cache.

Related guides

• pip cache~/Library/Caches/pip
• .cache~/.cache
• Conda package cache~/miniconda3/pkgs (or ~/anaconda3/pkgs)
• Hugging Face cache~/.cache/huggingface