How to clear the Gradle cache

Android and JVM builds stash jars and transforms in ~/.gradle. Clearing caches is usually safe; clearing the whole .gradle directory is harsher — know which folder you mean.

Paths that matter

• ~/.gradle/caches — dependency & transform cache (safe to clear)
• ~/.gradle/wrapper — downloaded Gradle distributions
• Project build/ and .gradle/ — local build outputs

Recommended clear

# Quit Android Studio / Gradle daemons first
rm -rf ~/.gradle/caches/

Or from a project: ./gradlew clean (project only), then optionally wipe the global caches folder above.

Stop daemons first

./gradlew --stop

Stops Gradle daemons so files are not locked mid-delete.

Measure with devdisk

devdisk lists Gradle caches under build caches when present, never deletes, and can emit a cleanup script you review.

curl -fsSLO https://disk.sadana.app/devdisk.py && python3 devdisk.py

Run free scannerSample report

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