Clean Me is a small macOS app that acts as a system cleaner (logs, cache, etc.)

Read this first

The developer does NOT recommend you to delete ALL of your cache (or cache of some specific programs). Cache files are what makes your program load faster and perform tasks faster. If you delete them, your program will not only start slower but will REGENERATE the cache files again. This will NOT save you some precious space on your disk. But if you do have a problem and want to delete the cache of some programs, you can click on the folder icon and search for that program and delete it this way.

If you have large log files, then you can delete these but first check the log files. A large log file mostly indicates that a program or your system really has some problems.

The developer recommends emptying the trash, deleting Xcode derived data and mail attachments once in a while.

You can see which folders are checked here.

Security

Clean Me uses the pod ‘STPrivilegedTask’ to handle sensitive data like getting your root password. Clean Me does not save this password, nor it loads the password in a variable. If you do not trust Clean Me, then check its code or block all internet access with Little Snitch or RadioSilence (normally it shouldn’t request an internet connection).

Enable full disk access to be able to remove iMessage attachments

To be able to remove iMessage attachments, Clean Me requires full disk access.

To enable full disk access:

1. Pull down the  Apple menu and choose ‘System Preferences’
2. Choose “Security & Privacy” control panel
3. Now select the “Privacy” tab, then from the left-side menu select “Full Disk Access”
4. Click the lock icon in the lower left corner of the preference panel and authenticate with an admin level login
5. Now click the [+] plus button to add the Clean Me app with full disk access
6. Navigate to the /Applications/Utilities/ folder and choose “Clean Me” to grant Clean Me with Full Disk Access privileges

Example of a use case

When someone was running appium for iOS (with the Xcode webdriveragent), he saw that his disk gets filled with some files (available disk space was shrinking over time). But a DaisyDisk search did not reveal his problem.

After running this app, we saw that Xcode Derived Data had a size of 60GB and system logs (/var/private/folders) had a size of 25GB. It turned out that Xcode builds the WebDriverAgent every time a user started a test (explaining the large Xcode derived data folder) and that the app (payload) and screenshots that appium generated were saved in this folder: /private/var/folders. We fixed this issue by running a small script that cleans these 2 folders every week.

How to use

When you’ve opened the app, you have 4 options:

• Click the app logo to see some other apps that I recommend (with links) and some links to this GitHub page (check for updates) and my webpage (but still need to write a page for it…).
• Click analyze to see how much space each topic consumes (also those topics that are not selected). This will ask for your administrator’s password for scanning the directories that require root. If you do not provide the password, Clean Me will just skip those files for which it requires root.
• Click ‘Clean’ to delete all topics that are selected. If a certain topic requires root, it will ask for the password. Again, if you do not provide the password, it will skip those files.
• Click the little folder icon to open the specific folder which will be cleaned.