Old html files are not being deleted

[Kyle Monette]

Hi all,

I noticed that every time I build a 'book' or 'course' to html, the html files accumulate in the output/XXX directory for each build, where XXX could be 'course', 'web', etc.

For example, 'frontmatter.html' is the most recent file but there are 'frontmatter 2.html', 'frontmatter 3.html', etc versions from prior builds. Similarly, chapter files, section files, etc also accumulate.

There are no errors with the build or deployment, per-se, but this means the projects start taking upwards of 800mb+ on my computer -- not ideal. And, it means that if I delete a page, its html output still resides in /output/web and can be accessed online.

I do not know if changing the levels or chunking options can resolve this or not.

Context: I'm using version 2.44.0 of pretext on a Mac, with the CLI. I downloaded pretext using pipx. Builds and deployments are via the CLI.

Thanks in advance!

Kyle

[Oscar Levin]

Hi Kyle,

Try `pretext build [target] --clean` to remove the previously built output files (substitute the name of your target for [target], of course).

Oscar.  

[Cameron Bishop]

Kyle-

Hello! I was in the same situation. I believe those files started appearing for me because of iCloud trying to back things up.

The fix I found was to put the project under my local user folder, which is not backed up to iCloud. Assuming you are pushing to somewhere like GitLab or GitHub, you will still have backups that are not just on your computer.

-Cameron

On Jul 18, 2026, at 12:31, Oscar Levin <oscar...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Kyle,

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