Written on 22 Jan 2023
Heavyweight dependencies
A one-liner to tell you how much space all of your node_modules
are taking up across your codebases - I've got gigabytes.
I've always liked how Node installs project dependencies into a node_modules
directory within each project.
It's cool because you can keep project dependencies separate. And, more than once it's been very useful to add debugger
statements into a project's dependency.
But it's not cool because it means you have a lot of extra code on your machine. Even if you use the same library across all of your projects it will be installed once for each of them.
I wanted to see just how much space its all taking up on my Mac for yesterday's post. I changed into the directory where I keep all of my projects and ran:
find . -name "node_modules" -type d -prune -print | xargs du -chs
And the result:
23G total