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Is it safe to delete Xcode DerivedData?

CacheCleaner guides · Updated July 18, 2026

Short answer: yes, always. DerivedData contains only build products, indexes and logs that Xcode regenerates from your source code. The only cost is that your next build is a full rebuild and Xcode re-indexes the project for a few minutes.

What is DerivedData?

Every time Xcode builds a project it writes intermediate build files, the code index, module caches, build logs and test results into one folder per project under: 

~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData

Nothing in there is a source of truth – it's all derived from your code (hence the name). On an active machine this folder commonly grows to 10-50 GB, because Xcode never cleans up projects you stopped working on.

Delete it in Terminal

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

Or delete just one project's folder – they're named ProjectName-hash.

Delete it from Xcode

  1. Xcode → Settings → Locations – click the arrow next to the DerivedData path to open it in Finder, delete what you want.
  2. For one project: Product → Clean Build Folder (⇧⌘K) removes that project's build products.

When should you not delete it?

If you're mid-debugging with breakpoints set on a huge project, deleting DerivedData means the next build and re-index takes a while. That's the whole downside – there is no data-loss risk.

CacheCleaner shows DerivedData size per project, along with device support symbols, old archives, simulator runtimes and every other cache your dev tools left behind – and deletes only what you tick.

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