XCleaner For Mac

Developers know that building apps from the ground up also requires large amounts of disk space beside programming skills.

Working on multiple projects at the same time is also a sure way to have your Mac's hard drives' space eaten up by intermediate build information, debug and release build targets, archived targets, as well as caches which are no longer useful for improving Xcode's performance.

XCleaner is a streamlined macOS utility created to make it as simple as possible to help Xcode users to free up disk space by deleting the contents of multiple folders used by Apple's IDE to store build targets and cache files.

Upon start, the XCleaner app provides you with a user-friendly interface which allows you to choose the folders you want to clear out, as well as configure it to automatically empty the trash for all or for any of the folders you need to be cleaned.

The folders which can be selected are DerivedData, iOS DeviceSupport, CoreSimulator, Backup, and Archives, each of them with a different spot in Xcode's project caching and backup process.

To be more exact, Xcode stores build information and your build targets in the DerivedData directory, and subfolders with the device identifiers for each iOS version in the iOS DeviceSupport folder.

Deleting the contents of the Archives folder makes it possible to remove all the deployed versions of your app saved for debugging purposes, and erasing the files in the CoreSimulator directory enables you to eliminate older version simulator folders you no longer require.

As an additional bonus, you can also delete the com.apple.dt.Xcode from the ~/Library/Caches/ folder to quickly remove and rebuild its caches using the XCleaner app.

For further details on what other files you can erase from your hard drives, you can click on the question mark signs next to each folder or have a look at the "Xcode users can free up space on your Mac" blog post which was used as a source of inspiration when creating the XCleaner app.

Needless to say, Xcleaner provides you with an easy way to rapidly free up tens of gigabytes of disk space just by emptying the DerivedData and iOS Support folders.

If you also take into account that you can also use it to clear Xcode's cache, deployed versions of your app, and intermediate builds, it's obvious that making use of XCleaner to free up disk space is a good idea for any Xcode user who runs out of space regularly.