How to fully clean bin and obj folders within Visual Studio?

Question

If you right click on a folder, you will see a "Clean" menu item. I assumed this would clean (remove) the obj and bin directory. However, as far as I can see, it does nothing. Is there another way? (please don't tell me to go to Windows Explorer or the cmd.exe) I'd like to remove the obj and bin folder so that I can easily zip the whole thing.

Solution 1

As others have responded already Clean will remove all artifacts that are generated by the build. But it will leave behind everything else.

If you have some customizations in your MSBuild project this could spell trouble and leave behind stuff you would think it should have deleted.

You can circumvent this problem with a simple change to your .*proj by adding this somewhere near the end :

<Target Name="SpicNSpan"
        AfterTargets="Clean">
    <RemoveDir Directories="$(OUTDIR)"/>
</Target>

Which will remove everything in your bin folder of the current platform/configuration.

------ Edit Slight evolution based on Shaman's answer below (share the votes and give him some too)

<Target Name="SpicNSpan"  AfterTargets="Clean">
    <!-- Remove obj folder -->
    <RemoveDir Directories="$(BaseIntermediateOutputPath)" />
    <!-- Remove bin folder -->
    <RemoveDir Directories="$(BaseOutputPath)" />
</Target>

---- Edit again with parts from xDisruptor but I removed the .vs deletion as this would be better served in a .gitignore (or equivalent)

Updated for VS 2015.

<Target Name="SpicNSpan" AfterTargets="Clean"> <!-- common vars https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/c02as0cs.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396 -->
     <RemoveDir Directories="$(TargetDir)" /> <!-- bin -->
     <RemoveDir Directories="$(ProjectDir)$(BaseIntermediateOutputPath)" /> <!-- obj -->
</Target>

He also provides a good suggestion on making the task easier to deploy and maintain if you have multiple projects to push this into.

If you vote this answer be sure to vote them both as well.

Solution 2

If you are using git and have a correct .gitignore in your project, you can

git clean -xdf --dry-run

to remove absolutely every file on the .gitignore list, i.e. it will clean obj, and bin folders (the x triggers this behavior)

---

Note: The parameter --dry-run will only simulate the operation ("Would remove ...") and show you what git would delete. Try it with dry-run, then remove the parameter and it will really delete the files+folders.

Optionally, after that clean command, you can use dotnet restore mySolution.sln to get all the NUGET packages restored. And if you have a developer console open anyway,
you can quickly run msbuild -m mySolution.sln afterwards (without having Visual Studio open) to see if it was successful.

Solution 3

For Visual Studio 2015 the MSBuild variables have changed a bit:

  <Target Name="SpicNSpan" AfterTargets="Clean"> <!-- common vars https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/c02as0cs.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396 -->
         <RemoveDir Directories="$(TargetDir)" /> <!-- bin -->
         <RemoveDir Directories="$(SolutionDir).vs" /> <!-- .vs -->
         <RemoveDir Directories="$(ProjectDir)$(BaseIntermediateOutputPath)" /> <!-- obj -->
  </Target>

Notice that this snippet also wipes out the .vs folder from the root directory of your solution. You may want to comment out the associated line if you feel that removing the .vs folder is an overkill. I have it enabled because I noticed that in some third party projects it causes issues when files ala application.config exist inside the .vs folder.

Addendum:

If you are into optimizing the maintainability of your solutions you might want to take things one step further and place the above snippet into a separate file like so:

  <Project xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
       <Target Name="SpicNSpan" AfterTargets="Clean"> <!-- common vars https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/c02as0cs.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396 -->
            <RemoveDir Directories="$(TargetDir)" /> <!-- bin -->
            <RemoveDir Directories="$(SolutionDir).vs" /> <!-- .vs -->
            <RemoveDir Directories="$(ProjectDir)$(BaseIntermediateOutputPath)" /> <!-- obj -->
       </Target>
  </Project>

And then include this file at the very end of each and every one of your *.csproj files like so:

     [...]
     <Import Project="..\..\Tools\ExtraCleanup.targets"/>
  </Project>

This way you can enrich or fine-tune your extra-cleanup-logic centrally, in one place without going through the pains of manually editing each and every *.csproj file by hand every time you want to make an improvement.

Solution 4

To delete bin and obj before build add to project file:

<Target Name="BeforeBuild">
    <!-- Remove obj folder -->
    <RemoveDir Directories="$(BaseIntermediateOutputPath)" />
    <!-- Remove bin folder -->
    <RemoveDir Directories="$(BaseOutputPath)" />
</Target>

Here is article: How to remove bin and/or obj folder before the build or deploy

Solution 5

This site: https://sachabarbs.wordpress.com/2014/10/24/powershell-to-clean-visual-studio-binobj-folders/ uses William Kempf's powershell commands to remove any bin and obj folders from the current directory and sub directories. It should be possible to run it from the root of the drive.

Here is William's version

 gci -inc bin,obj -rec | rm -rec -force

In William's own words:

That wipes out all of the “bin” and “obj” directories in the current directory and every subdirectory. Super useful to run in your workspace directory to get to a “clean” state, especially when someone messes up and there’s something that a Clean or Rebuild inside the IDE doesn’t catch.

For those of you reading that may not know, PowerShell supports command aliases, here it is rewritten again not using the aliases

Get-ChildItem -inc bin,obj -rec | Remove-Item -rec -force

NOTE : You should have this stored in a PowerShell file and place that file at the root of your solution (where the .sln file resides), and then run it when you want a proper clean (not the micky mouse one that VisualStudio does, and reports success too).

View more solutions

Comments

[Michael Freidgeim]

Possible duplicate of I want to delete all bin and obj folders to force all projects to rebuild everything

[Philip Oakley]

If built by CMake (CMakeLists.txt) then there can also be a 'CMakeSettings.json' file. This was, for me, one level up from the vcpkg install sub-dir. That file wasn't part of the project's .gitignore so was confusing for Ruben's git clean ... method.

[tom7]

I'd like to remove everything that's not necessary to compilation so that I can zip it and send it. Having .exes in zip files can be a problem for anti viruses.

[tom7]

I want to remove bin and obj directories in order to zip everything.

[tom7]

"Clean" does not remove the .exe.

[abelenky]

Just tried it with my Visual Studio 2005, and I can verify that "Clean" did remove the .exe (and all other files).

[Christopher]

Yes. But as I said, the build products are removed. That means the .obj and .exe files. Just not the actual folders.

[Keith Hoffman]

In Visual Studio 2010, maybe. Right now, I can confirm that a "Clean Solution" does not remove dlls from the Debug/bin folders.

[Newtopian]

Clean does not delete files if they are not computed by the build. If some files travel to the outdir by some other mecanism then clean will not delete them. In other words, when wearing build manager`s hat, clean is completely and utterly useless, dangerous even.

[Rolf]

This is the best solution, works, doesn't require special tools and makes sure every teammember uses the same "clean" method. Why MS Visual Studio doesn't clean properly is a complete mystery to me.

[tomoguisuru]

This is by far the easiest solution to implement and gets the job done without any external plugins

[aliceraunsbaek]

Not sure how to activate/call this target. Just choosing 'Clean' does not appear to do anything. So how do I use it?

[Newtopian]

sorry just now saw your comment. Specifying AfterTargets="Clean" will hook the target to the internal clean target for VisualStudio. However this simple target does not provide any feedbaco to the console so it will not do much other than wiping out your $(OUTDIR) from existence. You can add some error management and messages to it and get some better feedback.

[Newtopian]

I like the idea of removing the intermediaries as well, however there are significant side effects to hooking at BeforeBuild as it will wipe all possibilities to perform incremental builds. In projects that take significant amount of time to build this is a show stopper. Also by wiping out the base output dir you may interfere with tools that may want to perform multi-target/configuration builds and cumulate the results prior to packaging it for deployment, here only the last build performed will survive.

[CAD bloke]

I tried this in VS 2013 and it actually added folders to \bin & \obj. Caveat: my .csproj imports a few external .csproj files with build configurations - there are 26 builds, each of which goes in a subfolder under \obj / \bin (I can explain!).

[Newtopian]

Mystery to me how RemoveDirectory can add directory ! I would think it probably a side effect of something else in your MSbuild tasks, perhaps the folders are created automatically after a clean has been called

[Randy P.]

We had a phantom orphaned assembly, adding this to the end of our .csproj did exactly what the OP suggested and it fixed our issue. Love how clean the solution is!

[Ehtesh Choudhury]

This works beautifully. Very convenient when you want to do solution wide instead of just one Visual Studio project

[iokevins]

In Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2017 v15.3.4 (run as Administrator), removing folder ".vs" gives error, "Unable to remove directory "{SOLUTIONDIR}\.vs". The process cannot access the file 'storage.ide' because it is being used by another process." I can remove after exiting Visual Studio, but it re-appears after restart. I've commented out that line, as it's not needed for my use case.

[Newtopian]

yeah, I would not recommend deleting the IDE's working folder during execution. As I've stated in the answer this should probably be handled with an entry in a gitignore file (or whatever equivalent for your SCM of choice)

[Oli4]

If some of the references were removed/moved and the dll's were not referenced in code, they are no longer built into the bin folders, however they are not cleaned either. This ends up in a local vs of your application that builds, but fails everywhere else.

[Reinier Torenbeek]

@JoeHealy In stead of cleaning first and then zipping, it might be easier to use git-archive to zip directly from the repo.

[brett]

Works like a charm! This is the best answer. Also if, let's say the project is not using source control, this answer still aplies: just add the project to source control (right click on solution name), then run the git command above. Btw, how do you use git commands in Windows? I had to use Bash on Ubuntu on Windows.

[Raymond]

@brett Interesting ;) I typically use GitHub for Windows to pave (though I'm pretty sure VS installs a working rig that can be used from VS command prompt) - the settings lets you select a shell arrangement (from which I choose PoshGit). Using WSL is the most educational, so good call!

[Loudenvier]

Be aware that if you use a version control system like mercurial and it is in the same directory level as this script, this script will corrupt your repository if you store anything on it inside a "bin" folder ... otherwise this is a very useful script!

[mkb]

as I understand -xdf and -d -f -x means the same thing but I only got successfull result with git clean -d -f -x command. When I use -xdf it only says Would remove \somedirectory. Can anyone explain it?

[mkb]

ok. now I see; the key is --dry-run, this will only tells you what's gonna be deleted. nice

[Raymond]

@mbk correct ;) ... a less cryptic writeup I saw recently: jerriepelser.com/blog/…

[Vlad]

googled this question looking for automatic solution specifically to stop manually doing it in FAR Manager lol

[crokusek]

For me, this answer only cleaned the files within an ignored directory and did not recursively clean sub directories within an ignore. Like it cleaned bin files but not bin/Debug/*

[Raymond]

@crokusek that suggests that your .gitignore is inconsistent in some way - the git clean is pretty predictable and GIGO

[Tim Sparkles]

@Rolf Visual Studio doesn't clean "properly" by default because MS has to support the use case where N different projects output to the same directory. If cleaning a project clobbered its entire output directory by default, it could clobber files entirely unrelated to that project. So instead the default behavior is to keep track of files that are actually output by the build process and delete only those files on clean. A common class of breakage at clean time is caused by creating or copying a file during the build without telling MSBuild to add it to the tracking list.

[brett]

@crokusek you could make a copy of the project directory somewhere, delete all .git files, including .gitignore in the new directory and open the cloned project with Visual Studio. With right click on solution name add the project to source control. This will generate correct .gitignore file. You will then be able to run the command on this repository and clean up the extra files not really necessary for archiving the project.

[progLearner]

Is there any nice way to delete all files in a folder except from one specific one?

[XDS]

@progLearner ofcourse there is stackoverflow.com/a/10019708/863651

[progLearner]

Also, I noticed there are sometimes some file locks on some dll from the bin directory. Is there a way to force file deletion?

[XDS]

@progLearner it's a tricky question to answer properly. Some files appear to be locked yet if we persist 2 or 3 times then they do get deleted. Then there are cases where files are truly locked indeed and then you are out of luck because you can't delete them unless and until you kill the processes locking them. If you are in scenario #1 then you can try the delete-directory action from the latest MSBuildCommunityTasks which does have a persist-delete flag (you can read the docs on this one because it's outside the scope of this particular thread)

[progLearner]

Thanks, I am out of luck then. The problem is comming from a package dll (Newtonsoft.Json.dll) that sometimes cannot be deleted. Restarting VS fixes the problem, but it is a real pain.

[XDS]

I had a similar problem. There is a process running in the background called VSCompiler.exe or something to that effect. You can try killing this process first before you delete the directory and see if it works (I think it will). Good luck mate!

[progLearner]

Actually, did you manage to kill this process from within your .csproj? It would be great if you could share how you did that. Not sure how to do it in an automated way. Ideally, I would make sure to kill it prior to doing a Clean. Cheers

[XDS]

Let us continue this discussion in chat.

[Steve Smith]

This answer as it is causes problems with .Net Core. The next time you try and compile you'll get the error "Assets file 'c:\whatever\project.assets.json' not found. Run a NuGet package restore to generate this file.". To avoid this, don't add the line to remove the obj folder.

[StayOnTarget]

Is there some way to get this included automatically into all CSPROJ files referred to within an entire solution? There is the before.solution.sln.targets file but its not clear to me how that might help...

[XDS]

@UuDdLrLrSs none that I know of. If you ever come across feel free to point it out.

[Shiv]

@Rolf simply not scalable, not stable, not easily verifiable. Devs would forget to do this all the time and your project files checking by hand a few hundred files? Insanity. Really needs a proper fix.

[ist_lion]

This was the best thing I've ever come across - you just saved me so much time