Can I configure the location of the packages cache?

I voted. There's now a grand total of 9 votes (which btw should be 21 if you counted everyone that asked in this thread). The issue might as well not exist. Nobody ever has the time to go through all possible issues to vote, most users will never see the issue and therefore never vote, even if this and many other issues affects them. Relying only on the voting system is an incredibly bad idea.

This issue is relevant to at least 50% of Unity users. So many softwares love to treat your C drive as their own personal garbage dump and never ask for permission, it's a constant battle that has only grown worse with SSDs. Currently I have a bunch of projects in this computer ranging from 2018.3 to 2021.1. This means that for my most used packages there probably are 7 or 8 versions for each in the package cache, perhaps more since I don't know when (if ever) older versions get deleted.

This is a basic quality of life issue that should be prioritized, not languish in issue tracker hell for another 3 years. It's common sense.

You wouldn't happen to have that publicly available? I actually reached this thread trying to figure out how to use the Package Manager API so I could automate the importing of my most commonly used assets, assuming that since the asset store is now all in the package manager, there would be an API to search and grab them, but it seems to only work with *Unity* packages. Silly me to expect basic functionality to be present...

 

Not currently, though I always planned on releasing it at some point, but i'm unsure how helpful it would be for others.

The one main drawback currently is that it is unable to check for newer asset store package versions. It does report the version number and published date, so for myself its easy to simply check the asset store ( clicking on the package name in my editor will show a popup where you can view the asset directly in the asset browser or in a Internet browser window ).

At one point I tried hooking into the Unity web api to try and determine if a package had a newer version but I couldn't get it to work. More recently i'd planned to examine the package manager code and see if there was any exposed or even internal api for doing that, but haven't had the time. Initially I was also hopeful that providing the assets store packages in the package manager might make my editor tool redundant, but my experience with it was appalling bad to the point I've not tried it again.

If you are on github I could make a private repro for you to test with, pm me with your username and email, either here or i guess you can do that on github ( i have some repros in my sig ).

EDIT:
Have released the Unity AssetStoreOrganizer editor tool on github.
Please check the read me to learn how to use it and what features it has.

 

Same issue here : small SSD C:/ drive for executables, big magnetic drive for content.
I voted for the feature request. Managing drives appears to me as a basic software setting.

 

It would seem that Unity still doesn't clean up after itself...

12GB in AppData\Local\Unity
0.5GB in AppData\Roaming\Unity (and that is because I cleaned the asset store downloads already)

Why do packages even reside on our drives? Can't you just download them on demand?

Then you have the editors:

4.8GB for 2020.3
4.1GB for 2019.4
2.7GB for 2018.4

Unity has grown FAT AND SLOW.

I Just finished setting up my new pc a: 5900x with a High end SSD and 64GB of ram and unity editor is still freezing all the time to do "stuff" on the main thread. It's a real pain in the ass.

2017 is the last version I remember using that didn't feel like an Autodesk bloatware.

The similarities are staggering.

 

It would be very bad to download them every time when you create a new project and install it. We need to be able to choose where to put it, not abolish it.

 

It's nearly July 2021 and this still hasn't been fixed. No wonder UE is eating Unity's lunch. Developer UX PEOPLE!!!

 

Hey there, sincere apologies for the delays on this one. I've chat to the team to get an update on this who advise me that they are still exploring adding this but there's no timeframe on when this will be done.

 

Is it reasonable to consider this as evidence that Unity development is horrendously inefficient, disorganized, and bad at choosing priorities? It's been three years.

I mean, seriously? Y'all can't even add a command-line flag for it? That's gotta be like 2 lines of code...

 

Guys, seriously?

 

I'd like to understand the thinking that led them to decide this wasn't important:

1. No workaround that isn't technically challenging
2. Affects people through no direct action of their own (just use Unity normally long enough on a typical PC with an SSD system drive)
3. Affects new users and inexperienced users (who are maybe possibly more likely to have a machine configured with a small SSD system drive)
4. Side effects are widespread (affects the whole system), severe (many apps fail randomly) and hard to diagnose (error messages rarely say "your system drive is nearly full" - instead you get messages about temp files, or just a sudden force close)

My only conclusion is that the Unity team responsible use the criteria "Does it affect me?" to decide on the priority of a fix.

And this is most certainly a fix - not a new feature. This should never have been designed this way.

 

My regular search engine led me to this post, yup, another usability bug (it's a bug not a missing feature) that has not been solved after several years.

That being said, kudos to UnityMaru and the other unity folks that at least care to reply to the thread even if they don't bring good news. All other teams (I'm looking at u DOTS) should learn from u guys.


My work around for this (and a lot other issues with how AppData is used by a lot of software makers) was to move the entiry user profile folder to a secondary drive and have only 1 symlink. As a side effect this makes it a lot more easy and safe to keep your entire user profile between windows installations

 

FYI
Whilst checking the known issues for 2019.4.29 I noticed an entry for UPM and AssetStore Package locations that had an issue tracker link which led to this page.

It states that a fix is planned for 2019.4.x, 2020.3.x, 2021.1.x, 2021.2.x which taken at face value is great news as it means it might actually happen soon.

If you want to you can add more votes to the issue by going to the page and voting.

 

I'm thoroughly confused.. same as everyone else here, my C: drive is running full. After some searching I came across the UPM_CACHE_ROOT env variable, but setting this or UPM_CACHE_PATH doesn't seem to have any effect.

See https://docs.unity3d.com/2021.1/Documentation/Manual/upm-config.html#cacheconfig

So, is this broken or (contradicting the docs) not implemented at all? I've voted on the issue mentioned above, but still wondering if it's a different problem.

 

While I cant relay an exact ETA on when this will be fixed, I can say that this has been worked on for some time to improve, so this shouldn't be a thing forever.

 

Narrators Voice: "...but it probably will be..."

 

I genuinely feel for you.. Having to be the in-between for a feature that you know is great, but being told to tell everyone it's still not a priority.

 

I really hope the way you've worded this is what we're asking for. "Flexibility to choose which cache settings that fit your project setup for UPM & asset store packages" sounds very vague to me. What I'm hoping is some setting in the Unity editor (or hub) where I can pick a directory where my downloaded packages go. 4 years on and we're still waiting for a fairly common sense setting.

 

I believe even the feature is completed, you will never have a chance to use it because they rarely backport new feature to old version Unity which you are using and can't upgrade to the new version.

 

2022 same problem

 

2022 has the config.

 

I'm glad this made it into 2022 however that's a year away until LTS. When/if can we expect to see this in 2021 or earlier versions?

 

Can we manually remove packages from the cache without blowing up the application?

 

Yeah. I regularly delete the whole cache whenever I start to feel my disk space should belong to me a bit more than it belongs to Unity.

It just means Unity recreates what it needs when it needs. Generally speaking any folder called "cache" *should* be safe to delete (assuming the developer is remotely competent)

 

almost 2023, still obvious feature not available

 

Incorrect, it was finally released in 2022.1, as noted two posts up from yours. Better embarrassingly late than never.

 

I want to thank you. I spent a long time googling "unity cacheRoot toml", "unity cacheRoot upmconfig". I had an error with my .toml file when unity would open it and try to parse it. Error said:

[Package Manager Window] Cannot perform upm operation: The file [C:\Users\me\.upmconfig.toml] is not valid TOML: Invalid character in unicode sequence, expected hex at row 1, col 19, pos 18:

I spent a long time looking at this doc page: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/upm-config-cache.html#upmconfigUser

It turns out I was using backslashes in my path variable for cacheRoot.

So I had:
cacheRoot = "E:\UnityCache"

instead of
cacheRoot = "E:/UnityCache"


Edit: I found this thread by translating this tweet written in japanese: https://twitter.com/rijicho_nl/status/1538211443149250561?lang=en

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