A common situation in learning modern WebDevelopment workflow is the constant accumulation of projects with aging/stale “node modules” directories.
The node_modules folder is where your project dependencies are stored, common knowledge. Its weight is also common knowledge and most of the time is HUGE
Print out a list of directories to be deleted:
AKA Search&Destroy, but search first…
find . -name 'node_modules' -type d -prune
To clear all node_modules folders from current folder recursively:
This probably what you need to use
find . -name "node_modules" -type d -prune -exec rm -vrf '{}' +
To ignore a specific subfolder:
In case you need something customized
find . -name "node_modules" -type d -prune -not -path "./folder-to-ignore/node_modules" -exec rm -vrf '{}' +
ELI5
find . Instructs the find program to search for files in the current directory
name "node_modules" Instructs the find program to search for files named “node_modules”
type d Instructs the find program to only look for file directories named “node_modules”
prune Instructs the find program to not descend into the current file/directory for it to exclude child “node_modules” directories.
On Mac, since -d was specified, -prune has no effect on the find program’s lookup results (per the man pages). However, on Linux, -prune still instructs the find program to not descend into the current file/directory
exec rm -rf '{}' + Instructs the find program to execute rm -rf on the matching results.
The code ’{}’ + instructs the command line to be built by appending each selected file name at the end thus invoking the rm -rf command less times than the total number of “node_modules” directory matches. This helps with performance.
This can save you some GB over several projects. If you need the node modules back, you can simply run npm install again
Bonus: use RimRaf
Install RimRaf node util:
]
npm install rimraf -g
And in the project folder delete the node_modules folder with:
rimraf node_modules