How to Safely Delete All Your Node Modules to Free Up Space

#npm #node #modules #delete

Open the directory on your computer where all your node_modules will be found (just cd into it from the command line)
Run this line while within the above directory to see a list of all the node modules that it contains (along with how much space they’re taking up): find . -name "node_modules" -type d -prune | xargs du -chs
Double check that nothing in the resulting list is a surprise (for me, none of them came from folders where I hadn’t created a Node project, which is exactly what I expected); also check to see how much total space they take up (it tells you at the bottom of the list; for me, it was 9.4 GB)
Run this line to actually delete all the modules: find . -name "node_modules" -type d -prune | xargs du -chs
It will take a long time for the above line to execute (for me, I think it took about 10 minutes); after, check your computer’s storage (for me, sure enough, I gained about 10 GB of free space)
If you ever want to reinstall node modules for any repo (e.g., for an old project that you want to spruce up), just go to its folder and run npm i to reinstall all its dependencies (aka, node modules)