A small native macOS app that finds and deletes developer caches: package manager and build caches for most programming languages, Docker leftovers, IDE and tool caches, app updater leftovers.
Pick the targets, see how much each one takes, press Flush. The disk bar shows how full the disk is now and how much will be free after the flush.
Website: https://bircex.github.io/macos-flusher/
Needs macOS 13 or newer. The app is a universal binary for Apple Silicon and Intel.
Download MacOS-Flusher.dmg and drag the app into Applications. The app is not notarized, so macOS asks you to allow it the first time. The install section of the website shows how.
Or install the latest release with one command:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bircex/macos-flusher/main/install.sh | bash
Or from a clone (needs Xcode Command Line Tools):
make install # builds and copies "MacOS Flusher.app" into /Applications
make run # builds and opens it without installing
Versions follow calendar versioning, YYYY.M.PATCH, for example 2026.9.0. The release workflow publishes a new version when a change to the app is merged into main. Each release has a DMG, a ZIP and a SHA256SUMS file.
- Web browsers: Chrome, Brave, Edge
- Music and video: Spotify
- System: app updater leftovers, user logs, Trash
- Chat and meetings: Slack
- Downloaded models: Hugging Face, PyTorch hub, Ollama
- JavaScript: npm, Yarn, pnpm, Bun, Deno, Corepack, nvm, node-gyp, Electron, Turborepo
- Python: pip, uv, Poetry, Pipenv, pipx, Conda, Ruff, pre-commit
- Go: build cache, module cache, gopls / goimports / golangci-lint / staticcheck
- Rust: Cargo registry and git, rustup downloads, sccache
- JVM: Gradle, Maven, Coursier / sbt / Ivy, Kotlin, Android, Bazel
- .NET: NuGet packages and HTTP cache
- Swift / Objective-C: Xcode DerivedData, iOS DeviceSupport, Simulator, Swift PM, CocoaPods, Carthage
- Ruby, PHP, Perl, Lua: RubyGems / Bundler, Composer, CPAN, LuaRocks
- Elixir, Erlang, Haskell, OCaml: Hex / Mix, rebar3, Cabal, Stack, opam
- C / C++: ccache, Conan, vcpkg
- Dart / Flutter, Zig, Nim, Julia, R, Crystal, D
- Containers and VMs: Docker build cache, dangling and unused images, anonymous volumes, stopped containers, Podman, minikube, Vagrant, Lima / Colima
- IDEs and tools: Homebrew, JetBrains, VS Code, Cursor, Playwright, Cypress, Puppeteer, Terraform, Pulumi, Helm, AWS CLI, Claude Code, Codex
Targets whose tool is not installed are greyed out. Two kinds of targets are off by default and labelled in the list:
- slow to get back: Go module cache, Maven, NuGet packages, downloaded models, unused Docker images
- deleted for good: Trash, user logs, stopped containers
Named Docker volumes are never removed.
Sizes come from du for directories and from the tool's own reporting for Docker. Deleting is either removing the directory contents or running the tool's own cleanup command (go clean -cache, npm cache clean, docker builder prune, brew cleanup). All work runs off the main thread; the UI never blocks and a scan or flush can be stopped.
Adding a target is one line in Sources/MacOSFlusher/Targets.swift. The app icon is generated by make icon from Tools/make-icon.swift.
MIT