remove

Remove stages from dvc.yaml and/or stop tracking files or directories (and optionally delete them).

Synopsis

usage: dvc remove [-h] [-q | -v] [--outs] targets [targets ...]

positional arguments:
  targets        stages (found in dvc.yaml) or .dvc files to remove.

Description

Safely removes .dvc files or stages from dvc.yaml. This includes deleting the corresponding .gitignore entries (based on the outs fields removed).

dvc remove doesn't remove files from the DVC cache or remote storage. Use dvc gc for that.

It takes one or more stage names (see -n option of dvc run) or .dvc file names as targets.

If there are no stages left in dvc.yaml after the removal, then both dvc.yaml and dvc.lock are deleted.

Note that the actual output files or directories of the stage (outs field) are not removed by this command, unless the --outs option is used.

💡 Refer to Undo Adding Data to see how it helps replace data that is tracked by DVC.

Options

--outs - remove the outputs of any targets as well.

⚠️This option may be irreversible (e.g. if the data isn't cached).
-h, --help - prints the usage/help message, and exit.
-q, --quiet - do not write anything to standard output. Exit with 0 if no problems arise, otherwise 1.
-v, --verbose - displays detailed tracing information.

Example: remove a .dvc file

Let's imagine we have foo.csv and bar.csv files, that are already tracked by DVC:

$ ls
bar.csv  bar.csv.dvc  foo.csv  foo.csv.dvc
$ cat .gitignore
/foo.csv
/bar.csv

This removes foo.csv.dvc and double checks that its entry is gone from .gitignore:

$ dvc remove foo.csv.dvc

$ ls
bar.csv  bar.csv.dvc  foo.csv
$ cat .gitignore
/bar.csv

The same procedure applies to tracked directories.

Example: remove a stage and its output

Let's imagine we have a train stage in dvc.yaml, and corresponding files in the workspace:

train:
  cmd: python train.py data.py
  deps:
    - data.csv
    - train.py
  outs:
    - model

$ ls
dvc.lock  dvc.yaml  foo.csv  foo.csv.dvc  model  train.py

Using dvc remove on the stage name will remove that entry from dvc.yaml, and its outputs from .gitignore. With the --outs option, its outputs are also deleted (just the model file in this example):

$ dvc remove train --outs
$ ls
dvc.lock  dvc.yaml  foo.csv  foo.csv.dvc  train.py