My M1 Macbook Pro was always full despite having a 1TB drive so I prototyped a simple Python script that knew about as many standard cache locations that I could think of. Cleared out over 300GB of space in one go. If you only work in one language you probably know the common caches, but I am using a lot of different languages all the time, and there are too many to remember.
I always wanted to give Tauri a try so I ported my script to Rust and added a bunch of features. It uses React and Tailwind Plus components for the frontend.
Reclaimr is an offline desktop app that scans your machine for development caches (node_modules, target/, .venv, build artifacts, Docker layers, Xcode caches, etc.) and lets you reclaim the disk space safely. It finds stuff across 100+ tools and shows you exactly what it'll delete before it does anything, with risk levels so you don't nuke something important.
You can add project search paths to find build artifacts and local caches.
It's free during the beta. Available for macOS, Linux, and Windows: https://reclaimr.dev/
My plan is to sell a buy once, own forever license. Perhaps with a yearly upgrade, though old builds will continue to work. If you don't want to put in your email to get on my beta list, here are some download links:
https://dl.reclaimr.dev/latest/reclaimr-macos-aarch64.dmg
https://dl.reclaimr.dev/latest/reclaimr-linux-x64.AppImage
https://dl.reclaimr.dev/latest/reclaimr-windows-x64-setup.ex...
Would love feedback. Bugs, rough edges, missing tools, whatever. I've tested heavily on macOS and Linux. It should be noted that the macOS build will require removing quarantine once installed:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Reclaimr.app
Future plans:
- Scheduled task that can notify you if caches get too big, and clear them.
- Handle more managed caches like homebrew, podman, etc that have their own clean/prune/cache commands. Docker is already supported.
