Mariuzzo
Code

Remove old node modules to claim space

Fri, 13 Nov 2020 09:30:00 GMT

At the time of writing this: I have 74 Node projects in my machine. Each of them have dozens of dependencies installed in a node_modules directory. And a few them takes 1GB of disk space. 😱

I decided to write a command that would remove node modules directories that I'm no longer using. For myself, I determined that any project that I haven't touched in the last 3 months was a good candidate for cleanup. Anyway, if I need to take on an old project, I would just have to npm i and wait a few seconds or minutes.

I ended up composing 2 commands: one for checking the size of node modules before deleting, and the other to actually remove these directories.

Note: The following commands assume that all projects are under the same parent directory. From that parent directory, these commands needs to be executed.

Checking the size of old node modules

find . -type d \
       -ctime +90 \
       -name node_modules \
       -depth 2 \
       -exec du -hs {} \;

Removing old node modules directories

find . -type d \
       -ctime +90 \
       -name node_modules \
       -depth 2 | xargs rm -rf

That's it! Removing old node modules directories have freed around 10GB from my machine. That's a win for me! Hope you find this useful.

Mariuzzo