SwiftUI Previews - Disk space issue

I'm seeing a lot of disk space (e.g. over 20 GB ) taken up by SwiftUI previews under this folder:

~/Library/Developer/Xcode/UserData/Previews

Arbitrarily deleting the contents of this folder seems to stop previews from working.

xcrun simctl delete unavailable does not seem to work on this folder, as well.

There is a device_set.plist file in the Simulator Devices sub-folder, and some of the sub-folders are not listed in this file.

In general, has anybody figured out a safe way to cleanup this folder or heard from an Apple engineer on what exactly goes on in there?

Does Xcode actually manage the contents of this folder by adding / deleting devices when you add / remove simulator runtimes?

To clean it up I do the following...

I quit Xcode, delete that directory and load Xcode and previews work.

So, apparently there is an xcrun invocation that handles this:

xcrun simctl --set previews delete unavailable | all

This correctly cleans up the folder without crashing the Previews.

That does'n work for me, terminal says Using Previews Device Set: '/Users/mcrich/Library/Developer/Xcode/UserData/Previews/Simulator Devices'

the Previews folder is taking up 165 GB of my disk and the size is increasing every day, it is insane. Did anyone find a solution for this?

I created a virtual drive on an external drive and made an apple script to close xcode and its programs, mount it in the correct spot, and re-open xcode.

Suggested by an Apple Frameworks engineer: xcrun simctl --set previews delete all My Previews folder was 110GB and went to 6GB. Everything seems to be working well.

It's 2024, XCode 16 and this one is still working fine.

xcrun simctl --set previews delete all

SwiftUI Previews - Disk space issue
 
 
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