Free up disk space on a Mac (developer edition)

Caches, old dependencies and Docker images quietly eat tens of gigabytes. Find them and clean them safely.

5 min6 stepsmacOS

See how full the disk is

Check the Avail column for /.

$df -h

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1        98G   61G   33G  65% /

2
Find what’s big in your home folder
Run this from ~ to see the biggest folders.
$du -sh * | sort -h
```
4.0K	README.md
120M	dist
1.4G	node_modules
```
Clean Homebrew
Removes old versions and the download cache.
$brew cleanup --prune=all

Clean Docker

Check first, then prune unused images and build cache.

$docker system df

TYPE            TOTAL   ACTIVE   SIZE      RECLAIMABLE
Images          23      4        9.8GB     7.1GB (72%)
Build Cache     188     0        3.2GB     3.2GB

Delete old node_modules
Run from your projects folder. Each project reinstalls with npm install.
$find . -name "node_modules" -type d -prune -exec rm -rf {} +
Deletes folders permanently. Run it from your projects folder, not from / or ~.
Clear the npm cache
Often several gigabytes.
$npm cache clean --force

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