5 years ago

How to magically free up gigabytes of disk space

#Webdev

I'm writing this quick tip just so I don't have to google it every single time I run out of disk space. If you have a lot of JS projects on disk, that means you have a lot of node_modules folders taking up a bunch of space. You can easily clean them up in 2 different ways:

 

Delete all node_modules folders

  1. Open a terminal
  2. Navigate to the folder where you store your web dev projects
  3. find . -name "node_modules" -exec rm -rf '{}' +

Be patient because this can take a while and there won't be any progress bar or visual indication that the node_modules are being deleted

 

Choose folders to delete

CleanShot 2020-07-29 at 12.37.24.png

 
  1. Open a terminal
  2. Navigate to the folder where you store your web dev projects
  3. Run npx npkill. This package will give you an interactive CLI which will measure how much space the node_modules are taking and it will let you choose which ones to delete

That's it, enjoy your disk space 🎉