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Delete Node Modules like a PRO 😎

Yaman on July 17, 2021

Node modules are famous for being the heaviest object in the universe 😂 and deleting them is no joke. It takes a long of time and we even end up wi...

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Manjit Pardeshi • Jul 19 '21

rm -rf node-modules does the job too

benjaminv • Jul 19 '21

No it does not :-). It is rm -rf node_modules does

Rohit Munde • Sep 26 '24

rm -r node-modules this should work

Shinigami • Jul 19 '21

npx npkill can recursively traverse your directories
So you can use it from e.g. your HOME folder and then remove every unnecessary node_modules in every directory/project

Martynas Petuška • Jul 22 '21

So can rm -rf **/node_modules

Shinigami • Jul 22 '21

This will remove everything without any control

With npkill you can select each node_modules individually

Try it and you will see what I mean

Cory Crook • Jul 19 '21

So the solution for excessive node_modules is to install another npm package?

Neenus Gabriel • Jul 19 '21 • Edited

You don't need to install another NPM package to remove node_modules you can use this command in your terminal and it will do exactly that

find . -name "node_modules" -type d -prune -print -exec rm -rf '{}' \;

this will look inside the folder you currently are in to remove all node modules folders that are found in the current directory and subdirectories recursively.

Muhammad Bilal • Mar 27 '22

i am getting Acess denied, even though i am trying on admin CMD

Neenus Gabriel • Mar 28 '22

This command is for mac and linux I don't think it will work in Windows CMD ... but if should work for you if you install cmder terminal which is a console emulator for windows ... you can get it here cmder.net/

Mohd Ahmad • Jul 18 '21

nice tool, but have you tried rimraf. It can delete any folder recusively with a simple command i.e npx rimraf folder_name. And it also provieds api to work in node projects.

Federico Vázquez • Jul 20 '21 • Edited

I'd suggest rm -rf node_modules package-lock.json (don't forget package-lock.json), that little b🎺tch.

Pacharapol Withayasakpunt • Jul 19 '21 • Edited

rm -rf $(find / -type d -name node_modules)

It shouldn't be that hard.

Sabz • Jul 19 '21

I use rm - rf... for years and find is super fast ... Never knew about npkill will check it out

Nitish Srivastava • Sep 8 '22

I tried rm -rf, npkill rimraf all kind of command to delete my node module folder.. nothing is working..also it is using 99 to 100% of my cpu .. its not first time..who the fuck has developed this nodemodule thing..one of the most irritating library it is

benjaminv • Jul 19 '21

I'm also very curious about in what os does recursive deletion takes long time. I'm in Ubuntu and macOS for most of the time, rm -rf takes no time to remove the whole node_modules directory.