Arduino has become a monster in terms of size.
Even doing the "portable" installation, it takes up too much disk space.
I only use it for ESP32 and ESP8266 boards.
Is there a way to remove the libraries and boards that I don't use and still work?
Thank you.
One thing you can easily remove to save a lot of space is the staging subfolder of your data folder (under the "portable" folder if you're using the IDE in portable mode). The archive files for all the boards and libraries you install are downloaded to this folder before being extracted to their final installation location. After that, the archive files under staging are no longer used. The one benefit these files provide afterwards is that if you later reinstall any of these things then they are taken from the staging folder so you don't need to wait for the download.
As for libraries, you're welcome to remove them but they usually don't take up much space. One thing to note is that libraries use other libraries, so even if you don't use a library directly in any of your sketches, you might find that you get errors after removing them. But there are almost certainly a few libraries that you'll never use. If you really care about every megabyte, you might take a look to see whether any of the libraries are especially large. Even though the amount of disk space used by the code itself is insignificant, some libraries have images or PDF files that are in the megabytes. These files are only there for the sake of documentation, so you can delete them without affecting the functionality of the library.
As for boards, you can remove the subfolders of the hardware and tools folders under the packages subfolder of your data folder (e.g., portable/packages/arduino/hardware/avr). I don't recommend removing the hardware/arduino subfolder of the Arduino IDE installation folder though because I believe this can cause some problems with the latest version of the Arduino IDE.
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pert:
As for boards, you can remove the subfolders of the hardware
Note that you can do this part in the Arduino IDE by clicking the "Remove" buttons in Tools > Board > Boards Manager.
Pert, I appreciate your interest.
I will follow his advice and inform him of the results.
Before starting:
- Installed Arduino 1.8.13 "portable".
- Arduino, ESP8266 and ESP32 boards.
- Only one external library, TFT_eSPI-2.3.56.
- Arduino folder size = 1,618,839 KB
portable folder:
Obviously, staging takes up a lot of space, but the biggest one is packages.
Thanks again and I will tell you the result.
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