Burrow

A free, open-source mole.fit — a native macOS GUI for the Mole CLI (mo).

Burrow wraps the free, open-source mo CLI in a native Mac app: clean junk, purge dev artifacts, sweep leftover installers, uninstall apps, run safe maintenance, map your disk, and watch live system status — all in one translucent window. On top of that it adds two things the CLI doesn't have: a long-running history of your Mac's metrics in a local SQLite database, and an MCP server so any AI agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex…) can ask "what's been happening on this Mac."

Burrow is an independent open-source project. It's inspired by mole.fit's structure and built on the same mo engine, but it is not affiliated with or endorsed by mole.fit — its own name, mark, palette, and copy are original.

Screenshots

Explain with AI — point an MCP-capable agent (Claude Code, or a local model via LM Studio) at Burrow and ask your Mac in plain language.

The tools

Tool	What it does	`mo` command
Status	Live dashboard with per-metric sparklines and a sortable/pinnable process table.	`mo status --json`
Clean	Preview what's reclaimable, then clean for real — categorized cache/log/leftover removal.	`mo clean`
Purge	Reclaim space from dev projects: `node_modules`, build dirs, `target/`, `__pycache__`, and more.	`mo purge`
Installers	Find and remove leftover `.dmg`/`.pkg` installer files in bulk.	`mo installer`
Optimize	One-tap safe maintenance: rebuild caches, repair metadata, flush DNS, restart Dock/Finder.	`mo optimize`
Software	Installed-app list with search/sort (size, name, recent, source) and multi-select uninstall; a Homebrew Updates tab.	`mo uninstall --list`, `brew outdated`
Analyze	Squarified treemap of your disk; drill into any folder, reveal in Finder.	`mo analyze --json`

Every scan offers a no-risk preview (--dry-run) first, a clear reclaimed-space summary when it finishes, and a Stop button to abort a running job.

What's on the Status dashboard

A live, glanceable read of your Mac's vitals, refreshed continuously:

CPU — usage, load averages (1/5/15), core count, temperature
Memory — used %, pressure (normal/warning/critical), swap
GPU — name and utilisation (Apple Silicon via IOAccelerator)
Disk — capacity and live read/write I/O rates
Network — up/down throughput per interface
Battery — percentage, health, cycle count, time remaining
Health score — Mole's overall 0–100 rating, with a one-line reason
Top processes — by CPU or memory, sortable and pinnable

Burrow's own extras

History — long-range charts (5 m → 90 d) over a local SQLite history of every metric, plus peak-per-process tables. Nothing the CLI keeps.
Activity — a running log of what Burrow has done (cleans, optimizes, scans) and the live status of anything in flight.
Menu-bar HUD — health hero, metric tiles, top processes, and live job status, all from the menu bar (you can also run as a Dock app instead).
MCP server — a stdio JSON-RPC server (burrow mcp / Burrow --mcp) plus an optional localhost HTTP API, so any AI agent can query your Mac's recent state. See Use it with your AI agent.

How Burrow compares

	Burrow	mole.fit	CleanMyMac	Pearcleaner	`mo` / ncdu
Price	Free	$9 once	Subscription	Free	Free
Open source	MIT	–	–	✅	✅ (`mo`)
Signed / notarized	in progress	✅	✅	✅	n/a
Junk cleanup	✅	✅	✅	–	✅ (`mo`)
Dev-artifact purge	✅	✅	partial	–	✅ (`mo`)
Leftover-installer sweep	✅	✅	✅	–	✅ (`mo`)
Uninstall + leftovers	✅	✅	✅	✅ (focus)	✅ (`mo`)
Disk treemap	✅	✅	✅	–	ncdu (TUI)
Live system monitor	✅	✅	partial	–	–
Long-term metric history	✅	–	–	–	–
MCP / agent API	✅	–	–	–	–
GUI	✅	✅	✅	✅	– (terminal)

Honest notes: mole.fit is more polished, signed, and supported — buy it ($9) if you want that and to fund mo. Pearcleaner is an excellent, focused open-source uninstaller. ncdu/mo are terminal tools; Burrow is the GUI for people who'd rather not live in the shell.

Settings

Everything is local and takes effect immediately unless noted:

Setting	What it controls
History retention	How long metric history is kept (1 day → 1 year); older rows are pruned hourly.
Vacuum after large prunes	Reclaim DB file space after a big prune (off by default).
Sampling rate	How often Burrow runs `mo status --json` (5 s → 5 min).
Menu-bar icon	Show the menu-bar item, or run as a regular Dock app instead.
MCP / agent access	Copyable stdio config + the tool list for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Cline, and any MCP client.
Local HTTP query server	Optional loopback REST API + port for dashboards/curl (relaunch).
Mole engine	Shows the installed `mo` version, with a one-click Update Mole.

Permissions & Full Disk Access

Cleaning system and app caches means reading TCC-protected folders, so macOS will prompt — once per folder — unless the app has Full Disk Access. Burrow handles this honestly:

Before a flood-prone scan it shows a gate explaining the trade-off, with a one-click link to System Settings → Full Disk Access (grant once, no more prompts).
Don't want to grant it? Scan with admin runs the same scan as root — root bypasses TCC, so it's a single password prompt instead of a flood.
Burrow only ever reads sizes; it never opens that data itself, and the real cleanup always goes through macOS's own admin dialog.

Requirements

macOS 14+
The Mole CLI — brew install mole. Hard requirement; Burrow refuses to launch without mo on PATH (and offers a guided install if it's missing).

Install

Releases are unsigned for now (pre-1.0; notarization is being wired up — see #10). Each path below clears the Gatekeeper quarantine for you. The full security/trust write-up — network, admin rights, no telemetry — is in SECURITY.md.

Homebrew (recommended)

brew install mole                        # required engine
brew install --cask caezium/tap/burrow   # the app (clears quarantine)

Direct download

Download Burrow-x.y.z.zip from Releases, unzip into /Applications, then:

xattr -cr /Applications/Burrow.app
open /Applications/Burrow.app

Build from source

brew install xcodegen mole
git clone https://github.com/caezium/Burrow.git && cd Burrow
xcodegen generate
xcodebuild -project Burrow.xcodeproj -scheme Burrow \
  -configuration Release -destination 'generic/platform=macOS' \
  -derivedDataPath build \
  CODE_SIGN_IDENTITY="" CODE_SIGNING_REQUIRED=NO CODE_SIGNING_ALLOWED=NO build
cp -R build/Build/Products/Release/Burrow.app /Applications/
xattr -cr /Applications/Burrow.app
open /Applications/Burrow.app

Burrow lives in the menu bar (it's a menu-bar agent). Click the icon → Open Burrow — or turn the menu-bar icon off in Settings to run it as a Dock app.

Security & trust

Burrow drives the audited mo CLI and adds no surveillance of its own:

No telemetry, analytics, accounts, ads, or third-party SDKs, and no backend — nothing to phone home to.
No background root helper. When Clean/Optimize need admin rights, macOS's own dialog asks you and Burrow runs that one mo command, then exits — you approve every elevation.
Local-only: the optional MCP HTTP server is loopback (127.0.0.1, off by default) and history is a local SQLite file. The one opt-in network call is brew outdated in the Updates tab.
Unsigned, pre-1.0 — full honest write-up, including the trade-offs of the admin path and the "Scan with admin" option, in SECURITY.md.

Use it with your AI agent

Burrow doubles as an MCP server over stdio, so any MCP-capable agent — Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Cline, Zed, and others — can read your Mac's recent state. Same server, same {command, args} shape everywhere.

Let your agent set it up

Paste this to your coding agent and it'll wire itself in:

Add the Burrow MCP server to my config so you can read my Mac's system history. It's a local stdio MCP server — run it as burrow mcp if the Homebrew shim is on my PATH, otherwise /Applications/Burrow.app/Contents/MacOS/Burrow with args ["--mcp"]. Add it under my MCP servers, reload, and confirm the tools burrow_snapshot, burrow_history, burrow_top_processes, burrow_process_usage, and burrow_info are available. Then tell me my Mac's current CPU and memory.

Or configure it manually

The config is the same JSON for every agent — only the file differs:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "burrow": {
      "command": "/Applications/Burrow.app/Contents/MacOS/Burrow",
      "args": ["--mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Agent	Where it goes
Claude Code	`~/.claude/settings.json` — or `claude mcp add burrow -- /Applications/Burrow.app/Contents/MacOS/Burrow --mcp`
Cursor	`~/.cursor/mcp.json` (global) or `.cursor/mcp.json` (per project)
Codex	add a `[mcp_servers.burrow]` entry in `~/.codex/config.toml`
Cline / Zed / other	the client's "MCP servers" / `mcpServers` config

If you installed via Homebrew, a burrow shim is on your PATH, so you can use command: "burrow", args: ["mcp"] instead of the bundle path. Reload the agent and ask in plain language.

Tools:

burrow_snapshot — the latest full status snapshot
burrow_history — a time-series slice of recent snapshots
burrow_top_processes — top processes by peak CPU over a window
burrow_process_usage — rank processes by cpu_time / peak_cpu / avg_cpu / peak_mem, with the window it used echoed back
burrow_info — what Burrow is recording, retention, and freshness

There's also an optional localhost HTTP API (127.0.0.1:9277 — /health, /info, /snapshot, /metrics) for dashboards or curl.

Develop & test

xcodegen generate
xcodebuild -project Burrow.xcodeproj -scheme Burrow \
  -configuration Debug -destination 'platform=macOS' test

The suite covers the parts that matter through public interfaces: DB roundtrip

range + stride sampler + prune + corruption recovery, Store clamping/defaults, Maintenance prune, MCP tool routing + the semantic usage ranking, squarified treemap invariants, the Full Disk Access decision, and mo output parsing.

Architecture

mo status --json   ──>  Sampler ──> SQLite (WAL) ──┬─> Status / History (charts)
                                                   ├─> HTTP QueryServer (:9277)
                                                   └─> burrow mcp (stdio) ─> Claude Code / Cursor / Codex
mo analyze --json  ──>  DiskScanner + squarified Treemap ──────> Analyze
mo clean / purge / installer / optimize ─> CommandRunner (streamed) ─> the tool tabs
mo uninstall --list ─>  Software (+ brew outdated for Updates)

One binary, two modes: default is the menu-bar GUI; burrow mcp (or Burrow --mcp) is the stdio MCP server (it forks before SwiftUI claims the process). The whole UI is one translucent window with a top-pill nav (Brand/Tool design system); Settings, History, and Activity are panes in that same window.

Attribution & license

MIT.

Inspired by the mole.fit Mac app (same author as mo). Burrow is an independent reimplementation with its own brand — no assets, icons, copy, or trade dress are taken from mole.fit.
The history-DB + MCP pattern shares lineage with the same author's Stats fork (caezium/stats@henry/history-mcp).
Treemap layout: Bruls, Huijsen & van Wijk (2000), "Squarified Treemaps," re-implemented from scratch in Swift.

Name		Name	Last commit message	Last commit date
Latest commit History 124 Commits
.github/workflows		.github/workflows
Resources		Resources
Sources		Sources
Tests		Tests
docs		docs
packaging		packaging
scripts		scripts
.gitignore		.gitignore
LICENSE		LICENSE
README.md		README.md
RELEASES.md		RELEASES.md
SECURITY.md		SECURITY.md
project.yml		project.yml

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Burrow

Screenshots

The tools

What's on the Status dashboard

Burrow's own extras

How Burrow compares

Settings

Permissions & Full Disk Access

Requirements

Install

Homebrew (recommended)

Direct download

Build from source

Security & trust

Use it with your AI agent

Let your agent set it up

Or configure it manually

Develop & test

Architecture

Attribution & license

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Burrow

Screenshots

The tools

What's on the Status dashboard

Burrow's own extras

How Burrow compares

Settings

Permissions & Full Disk Access

Requirements

Install

Homebrew (recommended)

Direct download

Build from source

Security & trust

Use it with your AI agent

Let your agent set it up

Or configure it manually

Develop & test

Architecture

Attribution & license

About

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Resources

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