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wipe-modules
Advanced tools
A little agent that removes the node_modules folder of non-active projects
A little agent that removes the node_modules folder of non-active projects 🗑️

If you're a Javascript developer, you know the node_modules directory holds thousands or even millions of files, resulting in taking a lot of space in your hard disk.
Enter wipe-modules, a little agent that wipes (eats, literally) that big node_modules directory of non-active projects.
Why in Earth would you want to have those monster-sized node_modules folders on inactive projects? You got your package.json to recreate it whenever you want, right?
Watch wipe-modules in action! 📺
I got the idea when I saw this Wes Bos tweet.
6 hours into a time machine restore - node_modules with millions of files is killing me pic.twitter.com/2KirOXF2v2
-- Wes Bos (@wesbos) May 1, 2017
Problem solved now! 🎉🎊
Can be installed with npm, bpkg or curl.
$ npm install --global wipe-modules
That's it! 😄
$ bpkg install -g bntzio/wipe-modules
Done! 😃
$ curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bntzio/wipe-modules/master/wipe-modules.sh -o ~/bin/wipe-modules && chmod +x ~/bin/wipe-modules
All set! 🙂
If you're using zsh or a different shell, make sure to have ~/bin in your $PATH.
$ wipe-modules --help
Usage: wipe-modules [path] [days] [options]
Path:
The full path of your code directory
Days:
The days you want to set to mark projects as inactive
Options:
-D, --dry Only show node_modules to be removed
Example: wipe-modules ~/code 30
That will remove the node_modules of your ~/code projects
whose been inactive for 30 days or more.
wipe-modules can be executed as a background job using using cron ⌛
To set a cron job, download the cron-file file included in the repo.
$ curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bntzio/wipe-modules/master/cron-file -o ~/Desktop/cron-file
This will download the cron-file and put it in your ~/Desktop location.
The default cron-file holds the following syntax:
0 11 * * * $HOME/bin/wipe-modules ~/code_dir 30
That is the crontab (cron table) file, it instructs cron to run the wipe-modules ~/code_dir 30 script everyday at 11:00 am.
Edit the cron-file to match your own needs, see how to set up a crontab for more info.
Note: depending on how you installed wipe-modules you need to set the correct path of the wipe-modules.sh shell script in your cron-file for cron to find and execute the script.
Now set the cron-file crontab file in cron using:
$ crontab ~/Desktop/cron-file
And you're done! 👏
To check if you've successfully added your crontab type:
$ crontab -l
It should display your crontab.
To edit a crontab, use crontab -e and to delete all crontabs use crontab -r.
Note that crontab -r will destroy all your crontabs, that's why it's a good idea to keep your crontab commands in a cron-file.
Cron is only supported in unix operating systems.
wipe-modules in action!Watch this screencast to learn how to use wipe-modules and see what it does.
MIT © Enrique Benitez
FAQs
A little agent that removes the node_modules folder of non-active projects
The npm package wipe-modules receives a total of 19 weekly downloads. As such, wipe-modules popularity was classified as not popular.
We found that wipe-modules demonstrated a not healthy version release cadence and project activity because the last version was released a year ago. It has 1 open source maintainer collaborating on the project.
Did you know?

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