Node Modules killing your hard drive space? Manually finding and removing is a pain, so here are some simple solutions
Option #1 - Natively
From your desired entry point, all you need to do, is run:
$ find . -name 'node_modules' -type d -prune -print -exec rm -rf '{}' \;
⚠️ This will delete all nested node_modules directories, and their contents ⚠️
If you'd first like to list of all node_modules
within your current directory, you can run:
$ find . -name "node_modules" -type d -prune -print | xargs du -chs
This'll output the path, and total size of each occurrence of node_modules
, and finish of by showing to cumulative total size
Option #2 - NPKill
NPKill is a simple, yet effective package that finds and removes all node_modules folders within your system.
After installing (with npm i -g npkill
), just run npkill
to start the CLI. From there you will be able to see all node_modules directories, along with their size and other meta data. You can then choose to delete them one-by-one, or all instances within certain parameters.
Note for Windows users
The above options are for Unix systems (Linux/ MacOS), if you need to do this natively, try the following commands, (thanks to Sahil Malik).
View which folders will be deleted:
FOR /d /r . %d in (node_modules) DO @IF EXIST "%d" echo %d"
Initiate the Extermination:
FOR /d /r . %d in (node_modules) DO @IF EXIST "%d" rm -rf "%d"
Done 😀