How to Clear npm, Yarn, pnpm and Bun Caches on Mac

I measured my own Mac on 10 November 2026. The npm cache in ~/.npm was 6.4 GB, and the pnpm folder in ~/Library/pnpm was 1.9 GB. That is 8.3 GB of downloaded packages that I never see in Finder.

That is on my 1 TB Mac, where it is easy to ignore. On a 256 GB Mac, 8.3 GB is about 3% of the whole disk. I don't use Yarn or Bun on this Mac, so for those two I go by their official docs, which I link below.

Your list will not match mine. You may see other folders, and that is fine. Use the same steps.

Is it safe to clear these caches?

Yes. A package cache is a pile of downloads. When you install a package, the tool keeps a copy so the next install is faster. Clearing the cache does not touch your code, your lockfiles or the node_modules folders inside your projects.

You do lose two things:

• Speed on the next install. Packages are downloaded again instead of copied from disk.
• Offline installs. With an empty cache you need a connection to install anything.

One thing worth knowing about npm: its own docs say the cache is self-healing, and that clearing it should never be necessary “for any reason other than reclaiming disk space”. So if a build is broken, the cache is rarely the cause. If your disk is full, it is a fair thing to clear. The same page says npm will not remove data by itself, so the cache only grows.

Where each cache lives on a Mac

These are the default places, taken from each tool's docs. A setting or environment variable can move them, so the command in the third column is the reliable way to find yours.

Sources: npm cache, pnpm store settings, Yarn Classic cache, yarn cache clean, Yarn settings and Bun global cache.

Check the size first, then clear

1See how big each cache is

Open Terminal and measure before you delete. du -sh only adds up a folder's size. Run the lines for the tools you have and skip the rest:

$ du -sh ~/.npm$ du -sh "$(pnpm store path)"$ du -sh "$(yarn cache dir)"$ du -sh "$(bun pm cache)"

I check my own Mac with a small script that runs du -sh on a list of folders. These are its two lines for the tools I use:

$ bash measure-dev-storage.sh~/.npm                        6.4Gpnpm store (~/Library/pnpm)   1.9G

If a cache is a few hundred megabytes, leave it. It is saving you time. If it is several gigabytes and you need the room, go on.

2npm: verify first, clean if you need more

npm has a gentle option and a full one. npm cache verify checks the cache and removes data it no longer needs. It keeps everything that is still valid, so installs stay fast:

$ npm cache verify

Run the du line again. If it is still too big, empty it fully:

$ npm cache clean --force

3pnpm: prune the store

pnpm works differently. It keeps one copy of every package in a store and hard-links it into each project, so the same package in ten projects takes the space of one. That means you should not empty the store by hand. Use prune, which only removes packages that no project on your Mac uses:

$ pnpm store prune

pnpm's store docs say this “is not harmful and has no side effects on your projects”. Prune works best after you delete old projects or their node_modules folders, because that is what makes packages unreferenced. I cover that in How to Find and Delete Every node_modules Folder on Mac.

4Yarn: one command, two versions

Run yarn --version first. If it starts with 1, you have Yarn Classic, and this clears its global cache:

$ yarn cache clean

Yarn 2 and newer keeps a global cache inside ~/.yarn/berry by default, shared by all your projects. Its docs describe plain yarn cache clean as removing the local cache files. To remove the global ones, add a flag:

$ yarn cache clean --mirror

5Bun: preview, then remove

Bun can show you what it would do before it does it:

$ bun pm cache rm --dry-run$ bun pm cache rm

Bun's docs also list bun pm cache prune, which only removes packages older than 30 days by default.

What my numbers mean on a smaller disk

The same cache hurts more on a smaller disk. Here are my sizes as a share of the three common Mac disk sizes. This is plain division, and your sizes will differ:

A cache is not sized by your disk. It is sized by how many packages you have installed over time. So a 256 GB Mac used for the same work can hold the same 8 GB of cache, with far less room to spare.

How often should you clear them?

Not often. A cache is doing its job when it is full of things you use. Clear it when you need the space, not on a timer. pnpm's docs give the same advice for prune: run it occasionally, but not too frequently.

If your disk is still tight after this, the caches were not the main problem. Old node_modules folders are the next place to look, and after that it is the rest of your disk. Start with How to Free Up Space on Mac.

The faster way: all of them in one list

Four tools means four commands and four places to check. DiskMate, the Mac app I make, does it in one window. Its developer cleanup looks in the npm, pnpm, Yarn and Bun cache folders, shows the size of each next to your node_modules and build folders, and moves what you tick to the Trash, so you can put it back.

The commands above are free and do the job. The app is for when you would rather see it all at once.

Frequently asked questions