Can I safely delete contents of Xcode Derived data

Question

I am running low on disk space and checked through a third party utility that among other things that ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData directory is taking about 22GB of disk space.

I searched stackoverflow and found this post

How can I safely delete in my ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData directory?

The accepted answer to this question suggests that I should not touch / remove folders from this directory. so what I did was

• Found an existing build project folder for an app that I have available on Appstore
• Deleted the folder from derived dir
• launched XCode 5
• Open that project
• Clean Build
• Tested and compiled it on a simulator
• ReArchived
• Everything worked. Nothing was broken.

Unless I missed something in that posts answer I want to make sure by asking experienced developers that if I delete all the folders from DerivedData it will not hurt me in building, testing and compiling those projects.

Answer 1

I purge derivedData often enough that I have an alias for it. It can fix build problems. I have the following in /Users/Myusername/.bash_profile

alias purgeallbuilds='rm -rf ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/*'

Then in terminal, I type purgeallbuilds, and all subfolders of DerivedData are deleted.

Answer 2

XCODE 10 UPDATE

On the tab:

1. Click Xcode
2. Preferences
3. Locations -> Derived Data

You can access all derived data and clear by deleting them.

Answer 3

~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData

Answer 4

 $ du -h -d=1 ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/*

shows at least two folders are huge:

 1.5G   /Users/horace/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData
 9.4G   /Users/horace/Library/Developer/Xcode/iOS DeviceSupport

Feel free to remove stuff in the folders:

 rm -rf ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/*

and some in:

 open ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/iOS\ DeviceSupport/

Answer 5

yes, safe to delete, my script searches and nukes every instance it finds, easily modified to a local directory

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -o errexit
set -o nounset
set -o pipefail
IFS=$'\n\t'

for drive in Swap Media OSX_10.11.6/$HOME
do
   pushd /Volumes/${drive}  &> /dev/null
   gfind . -depth -name 'DerivedData'|xargs -I '{}' /bin/rm -fR '{}'
   popd &> /dev/null
done

Answer 6

I would say it's safe--I often delete the contents of the folder for many kind of iOS projects, this way. And, I haven't had any issues with builds or submitting to the App Store. The procedure deletes derived data and cleans a project's cached assets, for both Xcode 5 and 6.

Sometimes, simply calling rm -rf on the Derived Data directory leaves a lingering file or two, but my script loops until all files are deleted.