Is there a way to run rebar3 clean without pulling and installing all dependencies?

[weaversam8]

Question is what it says on the tin. Since rebar3 clean simply removes compiled BEAM files, I'm not sure why it downloads all the dependencies for a project.

I have a build pipeline that runs rebar3 clean before some additional prerequisite steps for installing other erlang packages, but the clean command fails since I haven't installed those dependencies.

[ferd]

rebar3 clean does not only remove compiled beam files, it generally removes compilation artifacts, which is a bit broader considering people can write custom compiler modules.

There isn't a way to run the task without invoking deps anymore; this was added because there is a full rebar3 clean -a command that should clean all deps, and also an issue around how some of these deps require plugins to be properly cleaned. Supporting the in-depth clean (back in 2018) forced us to run the install step in order to run cleans. While this isn't optimal, it is at least more correct than the previous form. We ended up picking a less efficient approach to have it be more complete.

See #1698 for the discussion about it when it was implemented.

That being said, unless you are installing plugins that interfere with build artifacts, there is likely no need to run rebar3 clean on your own for beam files. The rebar3 app does a full graph analysis of all build artifacts, accounting for profiles, compiler versions and options, and will remove and clean artifacts on its own as part of each build cycle.