About dbt clean command

dbt clean is a utility function that deletes all folders specified in the clean-targets list specified in dbt_project.yml. You can use this to delete the dbt_packages and target directories.

To avoid complex permissions issues and potentially deleting crucial aspects of the remote file system without access to fix them, this command does not work when interfacing with the RPC server that powers the dbt Cloud IDE. Instead, when working in dbt Cloud, the dbt deps command cleans before it installs packages automatically. The target folder can be manually deleted from the sidebar file tree if needed.