[enhancement]: Stop forcing files onto the C drive.

[cgwers]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

Contact Details

No response

What should this feature add?

By placing the cache in the Windows user profile by default, you're eating space that the user might not afford. C Drives on modern PCs are often small SSD or M2 drives. Besides that, by forcing the cache to C, you're creating this issue:

Creating virtual environment at: Z:\Invoke.venv
Activate with: Z:\Invoke.venv\Scripts\activate
Installing invokeai package...
> C:\Users\test\AppData\Local\Programs\invoke-community-edition\resources\bin\uv.exe pip install --python 3.12 --python-preference only-managed invokeai==v6.9.0 --force-reinstall --compile-bytecode --index=https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu128
Resolved 101 packages in 436ms
Prepared 101 packages in 34ms
░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ [0/101] Installing wheels...
warning: Failed to hardlink files; falling back to full copy. This may lead to degraded performance.
If the cache and target directories are on different filesystems, hardlinking may not be supported.
If this is intentional, set export UV_LINK_MODE=copy or use --link-mode=copy to suppress this warning.

Please allow us choices for file placement. You don't know our space constraints.

DON'T BE ANOTHER MICROSOFT.

Alternatives

There's no workaround. You decided where to put the cache, not me

Additional Content

No response

[gogurtenjoyer]

uv and huggingface default their cache to the C: drive, but this can be changed:

https://docs.astral.sh/uv/reference/environment/#uv_cache_dir
https://huggingface.co/docs/datasets/cache#cache-directory

Invoke didn't decide this, but the tools it uses for these large model and package downloads did indeed follow conventions as dictated, yes, by Microsoft - you can try setting the env vars mentioned above to see if this solves your issue.