Clean Me

A macOS system analyser and cleaner

1613
85
Swift

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A list of all scanned directories can be found here.

Disclaimer

I wrote this app just for fast analysing purposes. the cleaning option was just a handy extra feature.

I do not recommend you to delete your cache files. Cache files are what makes your programs load faster and perform tasks faster. If you delete it, the program will not only start slower, but will regenerate the cache files again. This will not save you some precious space on your disk.
If you do have a problem and want to delete the cache of some specific programs, I suggest you to click on the folder icon and search for that program and delete it this way.

Large log files can be deleted after inspection. A large log file mostly indicates that a program (or your system) has some problems that need to be resolved.

What I do recommend are also the options that are checked when the app loads: emptying the trash, deleting Xcode derived data and mail attachments (once in a while).

Security

Clean Me uses the pod ‘STPrivilegedTask’ to handle sensitive data like getting your root password. Clean Me does not save this password, nor does it load 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 Clean Me should not request an internet connection, if it does, you app is compromised. In that case, remove the app as soon as possible.

Clean Me also will not delete the directory itself. Only the content of the directory will be cleaned. This is because some programs rely on the existence of the directory. This way, the permissions of the directory will also not change, which is a security baseline.

Installation and Usage

Clean Me can be installed using Homebrew cask or manually via the releases on this GitHub repository.

Install via Homebrew cask

You can find it here. Install it as follows:

brew install --cask clean-me

If you notice that the version on cask is outdated, please follow the instructions here to update it for everyone,

brew install vitorgalvao/tiny-scripts/cask-repair
cask-repair clean-me

Install manually

Clean Me can be installed like any other macOS app file:

  1. Download it here
  2. Unzip the file
  3. Copy the unzipped file (Clean me.app) to you Applications directory on your MacBook
  4. (Only the first time) In the Applications directory, right-click the file and chose open
  5. Now you can access Clean Me like any other macOS app on your system

How to use Clean Me

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

  • Click the app logo to see some other apps that I can recommend to clean and maintain your mac.
  • Click analyse to see how much space each topic consumes. 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 and display 0 MB.
  • Click Clean to delete all topics that are selected. If a certain topic requires root, it will ask for the root 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.

Full Disk Access

To be able to remove iMessage attachments, Clean Me requires full disk access. DO NOT GRANT THIS IF YOU DO NOT TRUST CLEAN ME.

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

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