SystemCleaner

A macOS system cleaner and performance manager that runs entirely on your Mac.

It finds what is filling your disk, removes what is safe to remove, and tells you the truth about the difference. Nothing is uploaded, no account is required, and every destructive action is reviewable before it happens.

What it does

Dashboard	A health score from live CPU, memory, thermal, disk and I/O signals, with the top processes and what needs attention.
Quick Clean	260+ known cache, log and temporary-file locations, sized and listed before anything is removed.
Applications	Everything installed, sized against the volume it sits on, and removable with the preferences, caches, containers, launch agents and receipts dragging it to the Trash leaves behind — plus the leftovers of apps you removed years ago.
Privacy	Clears history, cookies, downloads, sessions and autofill across every browser, with a keep-list so a clear does not sign you out of the sites you use.
Duplicates	Finds files that are identical byte for byte — verified by a full content hash, not a guess — and keeps one of each.
Large Files	The biggest items on the disk, with bulk selection, Trash-first deletion and a permanent protect list.
Disk Usage	An interactive sunburst of where the space actually went, scanned off-process so the window never blocks.
Maintenance	Rebuilds the caches and restarts the services behind stuck menus, wrong fonts, blank previews and broken Open With lists.
Schedule	Automatic cleaning on a launchd agent, so it runs whether or not the app is open — and catches up after sleep instead of skipping.
Startup Items	Every launch agent and daemon that runs at login, separated by scope, with disable and remove.
Extensions	Browser add-ons across Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc and Firefox profiles, with sizes, permission counts and removal — saying plainly which ones a sync account can bring back.
Processes	Live CPU and memory per process, with guarded termination.
Updates	macOS, Homebrew, Pantry and desktop app updates in one non-blocking queue.
System	Every installed app by size, and the volume readout behind the numbers.

Install

Download the latest signed build from Releases.

Requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later on Apple silicon.

Privacy

There is no telemetry, no account, and no network service.

The interface is a local web view talking to an agent bound to 127.0.0.1, started by the app and stopped with it. Cleanup history and your protected-path and cookie keep-lists live in a SQLite database under ~/Library/Application Support/SystemCleaner/. Nothing leaves the machine.

The only outbound requests the app ever makes are the update checks you ask for, which go to Apple, Homebrew and Pantry directly.

Safety

Every delete goes through the same gate, whichever screen asked for it:

• Paths outside your home folder and /Applications are refused.
• Sensitive directories and files — .ssh, .gnupg, .aws, .kube, Keychains, .env, private keys — are refused even when a request names them directly.
• Symlinks are never followed.
• Anything on your protected list is refused.
• Move to Trash is the default everywhere it is possible, and stays recoverable from Finder. Permanent deletion has to be asked for by name.

Results are reported as three separate outcomes — removed, skipped and failed — because "we refused this on purpose" and "the filesystem said no" mean different things.

Command line

The same engines are available without the app:

bun run cli --help

Command
clean	Scan and clear cache, log and temporary-file targets
uninstall	Remove an app and its remnants
disk	Analyze disk usage
scan	Find large files
monitor	Live system metrics
optimize	Run macOS maintenance tasks
purge	Clear build artifacts out of project directories
check	System health report
installer	Install the CLI onto your PATH
touchid	Enable Touch ID for sudo

Development

Requires Bun >= 1.3.0 and SQLite >= 3.47.2.

bun install
bun run dev

Build the signed .dmg:

bun run build:app

Before opening a pull request:

./buddy lint && ./buddy typecheck && ./buddy test

Repository layout

Path
packages/core	Shared primitives: path safety, exec, plists, app bundles, formatting
packages/clean	Clean targets, browser data, orphans, maintenance tasks, the schedule agent
packages/disk	Disk walking, large files, duplicates, Trash, secure erase
packages/monitor	CPU, memory, disk I/O, network, GPU, battery, processes, health score
packages/uninstall	App discovery, remnant search, removal, startup items
packages/cli	The system-cleaner command
app/	Application code: models, workers, desktop launcher and agent, support modules
routes/api.ts	The local control plane, registered only when running as the agent
resources/	stx views, components and layouts for both the app and the marketing site
docs/	The documentation site

How the desktop app is put together

bun run build:app produces the signed .dmg. The bundle carries a prerendered UI, the Craft webview runtime, and three binaries this project compiles:

• SystemCleaner — the launcher, which starts the agent and opens the window.
• system-cleaner-agent — the HTTP server, compiled from app/Desktop/server.ts. It imports routes/api.ts directly, so the shipped app and buddy dev serve byte-identical handlers and cannot drift.
• system-cleaner-scan — the disk walker, run as a child process. Off-process rather than off-thread because a scan wedged in a blocking readdir can be killed, and a Worker cannot.

The UI ships as prerendered HTML, so nothing machine-specific may come from a <script server> block on an app view — whatever a server script computes is frozen at build time and would describe the build machine forever. Host facts travel over the API and are bound client-side.

See docs/guide/desktop-app.md for the full build pipeline.

Documentation

• Guide — installation, usage, the desktop build
• Features — one page per screen

Contributing

Conventional commit messages (fix:, feat:, chore:, …). Lint with pickier, never eslint directly. See AGENTS.md for the project conventions, including the three x-data rules that are each there because a screen once rendered every binding empty with nothing in the console.