- Published on
Why You Should Use the NPKill Node Module
- Authors
- Name
- interglobalmedia
- @letsbsocial1
Recently I was introduced to the npkill node module
on Twitter
by T. Eric Cabrel:
Iām always impressed by the disk space taken by the node_modules. I just saved 17GB of disk space using npkill. An awesome tool š
what a great idea and tool it is! I have so many projects
on my laptop that use npm
. And do you know how much disk space
they were taking up? 34GB
. 34GB
! That is a MEGALOAD
of disk space
!
As long as you have Node.js
and npm
installed, it is very easy to use. I decided to remove 10GB
for starters. This is what I had to do:
First, I had to install the package
. I did not actually permanently install it, because I did not want to install it globally
, but just temporarily download
it. That is because I was not attaching it to any specific project or folder
. That then meant using the npx
command prefix.
What is npx?
According to npmjs.org,
(The
npx
command prefix) ...allows you to run an arbitrary command from an npm package (either one installed locally, or fetched remotely) in a similar context as running it vianpm run
.
What this really means is that if you want to use the latest version
of a package
without installing it globally
(which is permanent
until you choose to delete
it manually), you can use npx
before the command
you want to execute
.
I ran the npx npkill -d development
command in order to temporarily install npkill
and use it in my development
directory. The first time I ran the command
, I was prompted as to whether I wanted to install
it or not
. I responded by pressing the y
key for yes
. After that, I was no longer prompted. npx
automatically re-installed
the package
without asking.
After npkill
is installed something like the following should appear in your Terminal
window:
The "space saved"
should initially show "0"
, because no space is"initially saved"
. As indicated in the screenshot
, I already have deleted
two instances of node_modules
when I took this screenshot
.
The process
is very easy, and tells you what to do. The instructions
are highlighted in yellow
. The following is what my Terminal
window instance looked like after I deleted 2.86GB
worth of node_modules
:
And that is it!
To learn more about the npkill Node module
, visit NPKILL on the NPM registry
.