DEV Community

How to delete ALL node_modules folders on your machine and free up HD space!

Mark Pieszak on August 07, 2019

Originally published on the Trilon Blog on Aug 7, 2019. Whenever we work on a new project we need to run npm install, but how often do we think ...

Read full post

rhymes • Aug 7 '19

Thanks!

With this you can see how much each node_modules directory occupies:

find . -name "node_modules" -type d -prune | xargs du -chs

It will also tell you the total at the end of the command

Mark Pieszak • Aug 7 '19

I like it !! Let me update the article with this in there. Definitely helpful 🙌

Carlos Caballero • Aug 7 '19

Thanks Mark!

Wouter • Aug 7 '19 • Edited

I've actually written a little program recently that does something like this. It cleans up generated files and dependency folders, in all projects that haven't been worked on in more than 30 days (so you don't have to run yarn install again on your current projects).

Mark Pieszak • Aug 7 '19

Very cool! I like that it takes care of the -older- projects that haven't been touched in a while - I'll have to take it for a spin and give it a try!! Great work !

Seb • Dec 6 '19

If anyone else wants to know how to delete node_modules folders that haven't been used recently, modify the find command to check the mtime (modified time) of the folder. I use this to only delete node_modules older than 30 days like so;

Delete node_modules older than 30 days;

find . -name "node_modules" -type d -prune -print -mtime +30 | xargs du -chs

The -mtime flag can be configured other ways, e.g. to get all files modified today pass -1 instead.

Mark Pieszak • Dec 6 '19

WOW I love this !!!! This is an amazing addition :)
Adding this to my bash profile immediately - this is basically what I've always needed!

Great find Seb !

Ricardo Canastro • Aug 12 '19

I haven't maintained this repo much but I have created this github.com/canastro/remove-git-ign...

Its a cli that finds all .gitignore files under a given root and deletes them after confirmation.

Jaya Krishna Namburu • Aug 8 '19

Much needed !!

Mark Pieszak • Aug 8 '19

How much space did you end up saving? 🙌

Jaya Krishna Namburu • Aug 8 '19

12 GB of hard disk space :). Actually, I got an idea, if this can be written as a cronjob which runs for every 48hrs (something like that), and deletes "node_modules" for the projects which were untouched for some time. May be like more than a week. Most of the time I tend to clone a repo check something and never visit it again :X :D

Mark Pieszak • Aug 8 '19

That’d be amazing! Great idea 🥇
We might have to look into making that real quick! Would be fairly simple with NestJS Cron jobs and it could be registered as a startup service on the OS startup maybe 🤔

The same happens to me, we do lots of open source & consulting so after a few weeks/months there are so many untouched projects, I’m constantly out of HD space 😂

Jaya Krishna Namburu • Aug 8 '19

Exactly !! Let's start looking into this. I am new to NestJS, but it's worth a try which make life a little easier to manage :D

Mark Pieszak • Aug 8 '19

I’ll have a (hopefully) nice introduction blogpost to NestJS coming soon so keep an eye out!

You’ll ❤️ NestJS once you get going with it !!

Jaya Krishna Namburu • Aug 8 '19

Thank you, so much 😄 Would love to learn and built it 😊

John Griffiths • Aug 12 '19

The windows version will take a while as it looks at every file. If you just want to blast it, using robocopy is a good solution.

$ robocopy c:/someemptydir c:/path-to-node_modules /MIR > NUL

This method also gets you round the windows long file name problem that you often come across here.

Mark Pieszak • Aug 12 '19

Won’t this delete everything, and not just the node_modules themselves ? I’ll have to give it a try ! I saw someone else post this as well:

robocopy EMPTY_FOLDER node_modules /mir

John Griffiths • Aug 12 '19

It’ll delete everything under the destination path. Syntax is:

Robocopy <source> <destination> /MIR

With a redirect to null to remove output.

I’m not a node dev but devops who has to regularly remove these things from build slaves. Obviously there’s a cost on next build re-downloading.

zenmumbler • Aug 11 '19

Since it wasn't mentioned in the article: npm tools such as pnpm (by @zkochan ) and yarn in PnP mode (or the upcoming Yarn v2) will keep a single copy of (each version of) a package you use across all your projects and just link them locally, saving you a ton of space without having to worry about deleting old npm_modules folders. PNPM also does a lot of cool other stuff, not my product, but I recommend it without reservation.

Mark Pieszak • Aug 11 '19

Great idea! I’ll have to do add notes about pnpm in there for folks to use in the future! Thanks for reminding me 🙌🙌

Ken Flake • Aug 12 '19

This is a very nice thread. Thanks!

Well for me, I had 3 projects out of like 15+ in my dev folder that I didn't want the node_modules folder to be deleted.

My little workaround was to rename the node_modules of those projects to node_modules2 so it won't be affected by the script, then I turned it back after.

Mark Pieszak • Aug 12 '19

Yeah a lot of times I just wipe everything out, and go back to the recent projects and npm install again real quick. Check out npkill as well, you can interactively delete node_modules folders with it!