How to: Change TFS Temp Folder?

TFS uses a temp folder to get files that you view. The location of that folder is %TMP%\TFSTemp. It’s not configurable via TFS, tf.exe, or Visual Studio. However, you can just set the TMP environment variable. Simply:

set TMP=D:\Temp
set TEMP=%TMP%
md %TMP%

Then you can starting using tf.exe afterwards and it will use the new %TMP%\TFSTemp instead, same thing with Visual Studio which can be started by running devenv.exe

If you want to change TFS temp folder on the server side too without changing the system temp folder, you have to have IIS7 installed; IIS7 loads user's profile by default for all application pools, including environment variables. Which means that the temp dir for the app pool is its user's temp dir, and you can change this value for that specific user only, not the system value.

Another temp folder on the server will be %TMP%\TFLogFiles. It’s used by TFS to log tracing info. This location is configurable in the global web.config, it’s an appSetting and its key is called traceDirectoryName.

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