npkill — Clean Your Computer of Old Node Modules

If you’re a web developer, you probably have tens of projects on your computer, each with its own node_modules folder that’s sucking up space on your hard drive.

Not only is this an organized person's nightmare (thousands of repeated folders and files that aren’t being used), it can also be a serious space concern for those with smaller hard drives. The average node_modules folder takes 200MB, if you have 50 projects on your hard drive, that’s 10GB of node_modules that provide no value to you!

Thankfully, the wonderful developers of the open-source community have created a tool to rid us of this horror, introducing npkill.

npkill

With this tool, you can really easily find and remove old node_modules folders across your hard drives. Not only will it find and list all of those pesky files hiding around your laptop, but you can also see their sizes and delete them all from the same place! How convenient.

Convinced? It’s pretty easy to use:

First, let's install npkill

npm i -g npkill

Now, let's use it!

npkill

Now, the tool will find all node_modules you have and list them. You can navigate the cursor with up and down arrows, then press space to delete the folders from your hard drive, freeing up precious space on your hard drive.

To exit, type q or ctrl+c .

Happy cleaning, and I hope you feel satisfied with a cleaner hard drive :))

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