CleanDevMac - Find and delete the dev caches eating your Mac's disk

Hey Product Hunt 👋

CleanDevMac (cdm) is a terminal cleaner for macOS developers. It finds the caches and build artifacts that quietly eat your disk — Xcode DerivedData and DeviceSupport, Go/npm/pnpm/yarn/Cargo/Gradle/Maven caches, Electron and browser caches, Docker layers, orphaned app data — shows you what they are and how big, and deletes only what you tick.

There's no install step. It runs straight from a one-liner, scans, and hands you the TUI. When it exits, nothing of it is left on your Mac. There's a dry-run flag too, if you'd rather look before anything is touched.

The things I cared most about:

• Nothing is deleted without an itemized confirmation. You see the plan and the sizes, then type y.

• ~/Documents, ~/Desktop, ~/Downloads, ~/Pictures, ~/.ssh and iCloud Drive are never touched. That guard sits below the rule engine, so a rule can't opt out of it.

• Orphaned app data and git-ignored files go to the Trash, so they're recoverable. Caches are deleted outright — they regenerate on the next build.

• Zero telemetry. The only network call cdm ever makes is fetching its own rule JSON.

• Rules live in JSON, not code. Edit them, or point --patterns at your own set.

Pure bash, no dependencies, MIT, free — no paid tier, nothing held back.

Curious what it finds on your machine, and what it misses. Happy to answer anything.

The dry-run by default approach is genuinely thoughtful - it treats trust as something you earn instead of assume, which is exactly the right call for a tool that could nuke a dev's machine.

honestly this looks solid, the dry-run preview before deleting anything is exactly the right call. one thing that would make it even better is adding a flag to export the itemized list as json or csv so you can pipe it into other tools or keep a record before nukeing stuff

love the no-surprises preview before deleting anything, that builds real trust. one thing i'd find super useful is a `--dry-run` flag that just estimates the total size reclaimable across all categories without listing every single file, makes it way quicker to decide if it's worth a full scan.

this looks really handy for keeping my mac clean. one thing that would make it even better is a dry-run summary at the end showing exactly how much disk space would be reclaimed if you ran the actual cleanup, kind of like a teaser for what you'd save before committing to it.