documentation/docs/db-maintenance.md

# Database maintenance

!!! Note

    You do not need to setup a cleanup cron anymore as there is now an automatic cleaning process in Invidious.
    Since this pull request: [https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/pull/3294](https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/pull/3294).
    But this page is left in case you need to manually cleanup the database.

Invidious needs one PostgreSQL database which has the following tables.

- `annotations` Caches annotation data if `cache_annotations` is enabled in [`config.yml`](./configuration.md)
- `channel_videos` Stores truncated video info, used to create user feeds
- `channels` Stores UCID and author name
- `nonces` Keeps track of tokens issued to prevent CSRF
- `users` Stores user info, such as preferences, username, subscriptions
- `session_ids` Keeps track of user sessions
- `videos` Stores video cache, used to create "top" page

The table `videos` grows a lot and needs the most storage. You can clean it up using following commands:
```bash
$ sudo -i -u postgres
$ psql invidious -c "DELETE FROM nonces * WHERE expire < current_timestamp"
$ psql invidious -c "TRUNCATE TABLE videos"
$ exit
```

For regular maintenance you should add a cronjob for these commands
```bash
@weekly psql invidious -c "DELETE FROM nonces * WHERE expire < current_timestamp" > /dev/null
@weekly psql invidious -c "TRUNCATE TABLE videos" > /dev/null
```