How to Clean Homebrew, Cargo & Gradle Caches on Mac

Developer package managers are optimized for speed, which means they prefer hoarding downloaded tarballs, wheels, and crate archives rather than deleting them. Over a year of active development, these caches routinely cross 30+ GB.

# Check how much space your package managers are consuming right now: du -sh ~/Library/Caches/Homebrew 2>/dev/null du -sh ~/.cargo/registry 2>/dev/null du -sh ~/.gradle/caches 2>/dev/null du -sh ~/Library/Caches/pip 2>/dev/null

Homebrew keeps downloaded bottle binaries in ~/Library/Caches/Homebrew/ even after installing them. Standard brew cleanup often leaves files younger than 120 days.

To run a full, deep purge of all downloaded bottles and old formula logs:

# Dry-run first to preview reclaimed space: brew cleanup -n -s # Purge all cached downloads immediately: brew cleanup --prune=all -s # Remove all downloaded git clone caches: rm -rf $(brew --cache)

Cargo stores every downloaded crate version indefinitely inside ~/.cargo/registry/cache/. If you work on several Rust projects or frequently upgrade dependencies, this directory balloons rapidly.

You can safely purge downloaded .crate tarballs and git checkouts. Cargo will redownload any required dependencies during your next build:

# Purge downloaded crate archives: rm -rf ~/.cargo/registry/cache/* # Clean git repo checkouts for crates: rm -rf ~/.cargo/git/checkouts/*

If you develop Android apps or work with Java/Kotlin, Gradle leaves gigabytes of old distributions and daemon logs in ~/.gradle. Similarly, Python pip caches wheel files forever.

# Clear Python pip wheel cache: pip cache purge 2>/dev/null || rm -rf ~/Library/Caches/pip # Clean unused Gradle wrapper distributions: rm -rf ~/.gradle/wrapper/dists/* # Stop daemons and clean Gradle build cache: rm -rf ~/.gradle/caches/build-cache-1/*

Rather than memorizing different CLI flags for Homebrew, Cargo, Gradle, CocoaPods, and pip, SpaceWise audits all installed toolchains simultaneously in milliseconds.

It flags stale versions, displays how much SSD space is reclaimable, and lets you wipe toolchain caches in 1 click without ever deleting your active project builds.