Fast Way to Make Xcode Use Less Disk Space

Published in

OmiSoft

3 min readSep 5, 2019

If you have been developing iOS or macOS apps for some time, you might have faced the situation when Xсode took a lot of disk space.

In this short article, I am going to show a quick way to clear the most consuming parts.

Here is the start point: Xcode takes almost 90GB.

The largest disk space consumers are:

So, we will clean them up a little bit.

1. Removing unneeded simulators

Consuming a lot of space, old simulators and runtimes are not removed by XCode automatically. In my case, I had more than 30 simulators installed.

The first way to remove them is to go to Window -> Devices and Simulators and click “delete” on each simulator that is not needed.

However, it can definitely take more time to delete each simulator separately, therefore there is a faster way, namely, via Command Line.

First, check the folder with runtimes:

cd /Library/Developer/CoreSimulator/Profiles/Runtimes

You will see several folders like these there:

iOS 10.2.simruntime
iOS 11.4.simruntime

Then delete runtimes which are not needed:

sudo rm -rf iOS\ 11.4.simruntime/

Next, to remove devices for runtimes that are no longer supported, run this command:

xcrun simctl delete unavailable

Voilà, we have +20 GB of free disk space! 🔥

Each of the archives can take up to 500 MB or even more, and they are also not being cleaned automatically.

You can find archives grouped by date here:

‎⁨~/Library/Developer⁩/Xcode⁩

Afterwards, remove the older ones just via Finder or any other tool.

This was just a hotfix that takes less than 10 min. As a result, the Xcode size has almost halved from 90 GB to 50 GB.

However, there are also other parts that can be cleaned (e.g. cache, intermediate build information, etc.). So, this result could be much better.

To make a more precise cleaning, check out next resources:

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About the Author
Dmytro is iOS & MacOS Developer at OmiSoft.

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