This RubyGems plugin provides the gem sweep command to clean up unnecessary native extension files from gem installations.

• Automatic cleanup: Automatically removes duplicate native extension files during gem installation
• Manual cleanup: Use gem sweep command to clean up existing gems
• Safe operation: Preserves files in versioned directories (e.g., google-protobuf, nokogiri)
• Aggressive mode: Option to also remove development directories (test, spec, features, tmp)
• Dry run mode: Preview what would be deleted without actually removing files

The plugin automatically cleans up extension files when installing gems:

$ gem install digest
Fetching digest-3.1.1.gem
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
Delete /Users/hsbt/.local/share/gem/gems/digest-3.1.1/lib/digest/bubblebabble.bundle
Delete /Users/hsbt/.local/share/gem/gems/digest-3.1.1/lib/digest/md5.bundle
Delete /Users/hsbt/.local/share/gem/gems/digest-3.1.1/lib/digest/rmd160.bundle
Delete /Users/hsbt/.local/share/gem/gems/digest-3.1.1/lib/digest/sha1.bundle
Delete /Users/hsbt/.local/share/gem/gems/digest-3.1.1/lib/digest/sha2.bundle
Delete /Users/hsbt/.local/share/gem/gems/digest-3.1.1/lib/digest.bundle
Successfully installed digest-3.1.1
1 gem installed

You can also manually clean up extension files from all installed gems:

$ gem sweep
Delete /Users/hsbt/.local/share/gem/gems/some-gem-1.0.0/lib/some_extension.bundle
Delete /Users/hsbt/.local/share/gem/gems/another-gem-2.1.0/lib/another.bundle
...

• --aggressive or -a: Also remove test, spec, features directories and tmp directories
• --dryrun or -n: Show what would be deleted without actually deleting files

Dry run mode:

$ gem sweep --dryrun
Dry run mode: showing what would be deleted

Would delete /Users/hsbt/.local/share/gem/gems/some-gem-1.0.0/lib/some_extension.bundle
Would delete /Users/hsbt/.local/share/gem/gems/another-gem-2.1.0/lib/another.bundle
...

Aggressive mode:

$ gem sweep --aggressive
Delete /Users/hsbt/.local/share/gem/gems/some-gem-1.0.0/lib/some_extension.bundle
Delete /Users/hsbt/.local/share/gem/gems/some-gem-1.0.0/test/
Delete /Users/hsbt/.local/share/gem/gems/some-gem-1.0.0/spec/
Delete /Users/hsbt/.local/share/gem/gems/another-gem-2.1.0/lib/another.bundle
Delete /Users/hsbt/.local/share/gem/gems/another-gem-2.1.0/features/
...

$ gem install gem-sweep

After checking out the repo, run bundle install to install dependencies.

To build the gem, run:

$ bundle exec rake build

To install locally for testing:

$ bundle exec rake install

RubyGems will install native extension files into the following paths:

$GEM_HOME/gems/extensions/$arch-$platform-$version/$rubyversion/foo-x.y.z
$GEM_HOME/gems/foo-x.y.z/lib

The native extension files in $GEM_HOME/gems/foo-x.y.z/lib directory is harmful for us. Because this directory couldn't handle architecture, platform and ruby version. So, We should use native extension files in $GEM_HOME/gems/extensions/$arch-$platform-$version/$rubyversion/foo-x.y.z directory, not $GEM_HOME/gems/foo-x.y.z/lib directory.

This tool is designed to be safe:

• It only removes native extension files (.bundle, .so, .dll files) from gem lib directories
• It preserves files in versioned directories (like 2.7/, 3.0/) to avoid breaking gems like google-protobuf and nokogiri
• In aggressive mode, it only removes commonly known development directories (test/, spec/, features/, tmp/)
• Handles permission errors gracefully by skipping inaccessible files

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.