Managing Disk Space

Managing disk space on your development machine/server can be pretty annoying if you don't know where to start. In this article I've compiled some important places to check, especially if your environment includes Docker, Python or Node. I'll be focusing mostly on macOS and Linux, but similar commands are also applicable for Windows.

Useful commands

• Use df -h to see the full disk usage
• Use du -sh <folder-name> to see the size of a certain folder

Development environment

Docker

• docker system df - prints the size of images, containers and cache
• docker builder prune - clears docker cache, used for image building (doesn't remove anything important)

Conda & Python

• conda env list or conda info --envs - list all environments
• conda remove -n <env-name> --all - remove any unused environments
• conda clean --all - clean up all files that were left by removed environments
• pip cache purge - clean pip cache
• uv cache clean --force - clean uv cache

NVM & Node

• rm -rf ~/.nvm/.cache - clean nvm cache
• rm -rf ~/.npm/_npx - clean npx temp packages

Additional shell startup speed-up

NVM is initialized whenever a new shell is opened (as defined in ~/.zshrc).

To only load it when the user requests it, do the following:

# replace
export NVM_DIR="$HOME/.nvm"
[ -s "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh"
[ -s "$NVM_DIR/bash_completion" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/bash_completion"

### with

export NVM_DIR="$HOME/.nvm"
export PATH="$NVM_DIR/versions/node/v22.12.0/bin:$PATH"
nvm() {
  unset -f nvm
  [ -s "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh"
  [ -s "$NVM_DIR/bash_completion" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/bash_completion"
  nvm "$@"
}

node and npm will continue to work immediately, while nvm.sh loads only when nvm is called. In the configuration above, swap v22.12.0 for your default version.

macOS

• To look up which files on your system are taking the most space go to Settings > Storage > Documents > File browser. Then navigate the tree and remove unnecessary files.
• rm -rf ~/Library/Caches/* - deletes temporary caches for programs (you might have to re-log in)

Homebrew

Auditing what is installed

To find out what you installed using the brew command, use the following:

brew leaves  # top-level formulas (what you installed on purpose) - we are mostly interested in this
brew list --cask  # GUI apps
brew deps --installed --tree | less

After that, remove any formula that you don't need by using brew uninstall.

Cleanup

Start by removing orphaned dependencies and old caches. This step is completely safe.

brew autoremove
brew cleanup --prune=all

Removing redundant runtimes

If you use conda or e.g. nvm for version management, you can also remove stale versions python@*, node@*.

brew uses --installed python@3.11   # check nothing depends on it first
brew uninstall python@3.11 node@14

Linux

• rm -rf /tmp/* - remove temporary files

Journal logs:

• journalctl --disk-usage - see the disk usage for logs
• sudo journalctl --vacuum-time=7d - remove logs older than 7 days

APT

• sudo apt-get clean and sudo apt-get autoclean - clean up unused files
• Remove unnecessary packages:
  • sudo apt-get --dry-run autoremove --purge
  • sudo apt-get autoremove --purge