cargo-scrub

A polished, fast, and safe CLI tool to recursively clean Rust crates in a directory tree. Designed for maintainers, CI, and power users who want to keep their Rust projects tidy.

Demo

The recording opens with a plain cargo scrub run that walks the tree and reports every crate it finds plus the reclaimable space, then switches to TUI mode: A clears the default selection, Up/Down navigate, Space selects a crate, and c cleans it. The fixtures shown are real throwaway crates with dummy build artifacts (sizes spread from 14 MB to 1.2 GB), and the TUI take cleans the selected crate for real — not a dry run — so the summary reports the actual reclaimed space.

The recording is scripted with vhs; the tape lives in assets/demo.tape and is re-recorded automatically by the release pipeline, so the GIF always reflects the current master.

Features

• 🚀 Recursively walks directories to find and clean Rust crates
• 🧹 Runs cargo clean in each detected crate
• ⚡ Async, parallel cleaning with configurable concurrency
• 📊 Modern full-screen interactive TUI dashboard powered by ratatui
• 🎛️ Beautiful CLI with rich options (dry-run, quiet, max-depth, jobs, etc.)
• 📝 Supports config file (.cargo-scrub.toml) for persistent defaults
• 🔍 Filter crates by name, path, or regex
• 🏷️ .gitignore-aware directory walking
• 🧩 Detects and handles workspaces
• 🖥️ Interactive prompt mode
• 📊 Summary report with stats and timings
• 🖌️ Colorful, pretty output
• 🛠️ Robust, extensible, and well-tested

Installation

Prebuilt binaries

Grab the binary for your platform from the latest release — no Rust toolchain required:

Platform	Asset
Linux (x86_64)	cargo-scrub-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
Linux (ARM64)	cargo-scrub-aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu
macOS (Intel)	cargo-scrub-x86_64-apple-darwin
macOS (Apple Silicon)	cargo-scrub-aarch64-apple-darwin
Windows (x86_64)	cargo-scrub-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.exe

Drop it somewhere on your PATH (e.g. ~/.cargo/bin/), make it executable, and it works both as a standalone command (cargo-scrub) and as a cargo subcommand (cargo scrub).

From source

cargo install --path .

Or from crates.io:

cargo install cargo-scrub

Usage

cargo-scrub [OPTIONS] [PATH]

Installed as a cargo subcommand, it is equivalent to:

cargo scrub [OPTIONS] [PATH]

Common Options

• --clean : Execute the cleaning process (omitting this lists detected crates safely)
• --tui : Launch full-screen interactive TUI dashboard
• --dry-run : Show what would be cleaned, but don’t actually clean
• --quiet, -q : Suppress most output
• --max-depth <N> : Limit directory traversal depth
• --jobs, -j <N> : Number of concurrent cleaning jobs (default: 4)
• --interactive : Prompt before cleaning each crate
• --filter <REGEX> : Only clean crates matching regex (by name or path)
• --skip-workspaces : Skip workspace roots
• --workspace-mode : Workspace mode (root, members, or all)
• --check : Only list crates that would be cleaned (default behavior)
• --config <FILE> : Load options from a config file
• --log-level <LEVEL> : Set log level (info, debug, error, silent)

TUI Dashboard Mode

Launch cargo-scrub with --tui to enter the keyboard-driven dashboard:

cargo-scrub --tui

Keybindings

Key	Review Screen	Running Screen	Summary Screen
Up/Down, j/k	Move selection	Scroll view	Scroll view
g / G	Jump to top / bottom	Jump to top / bottom	Jump to top / bottom
Space	Toggle crate selection	—	—
a / A	Select all / deselect all	—	—
/	Filter crates by path	—	—
d	Toggle dry-run mode	—	—
c / Enter	Start cleaning selected crates	—	—
?	Toggle help overlay	Toggle help overlay	Toggle help overlay
q / Esc	Quit	Quit (with confirmation)	Quit

Examples

• Scan and preview detected crates safely without cleaning:

  cargo-scrub
  

• Clean all detected crates in the current directory tree:

  cargo-scrub --clean
  

• Clean with 8 parallel jobs, max depth 3:

  cargo-scrub --clean --jobs 8 --max-depth 3
  

• Only clean crates matching foo:

  cargo-scrub --clean --filter foo
  

• Interactive mode:

  cargo-scrub --interactive
  

Configuration

You can create a .cargo-scrub.toml file in your project or home directory to persist default options:

jobs = 8
dry_run = false
max_depth = 2
filter = "mycrate"
log_level = "info"

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please open issues or pull requests. All code should be idiomatic, tested, and documented. See CONTRIBUTING.md for details.