tl;dr; fd -I -t d node_modules | rg -v 'node_modules/(\w|@)' | xargs du -sh | sort -hr

It's very possible that there's a tool that does this, but if so please enlighten me.
The objective is to find which of all your various projects' node_modules directory is eating up the most disk space.
The challenge is that often you have nested node_modules within and they shouldn't be included.

The command uses fd which comes from brew install fd and it's a fast alternative to the built-in find. Definitely worth investing in if you like to live fast on the command line.
The other important command here is rg which comes from brew install ripgrep and is a fast alternative to built-in grep. Sure, I think one can use find and grep but that can be left as an exercise to the reader.

▶ fd -I -t d node_modules | rg -v 'node_modules/(\w|@)' | xargs du -sh | sort -hr
1.1G    ./GROCER/groce/node_modules/
1.0G    ./SHOULDWATCH/youshouldwatch/node_modules/
826M    ./PETERBECOM/django-peterbecom/adminui/node_modules/
679M    ./JAVASCRIPT/wmr/node_modules/
546M    ./WORKON/workon-fire/node_modules/
539M    ./PETERBECOM/chiveproxy/node_modules/
506M    ./JAVASCRIPT/minimalcss-website/node_modules/
491M    ./WORKON/workon/node_modules/
457M    ./JAVASCRIPT/battleshits/node_modules/
445M    ./GITHUB/DOCS/docs-internal/node_modules/
431M    ./GITHUB/DOCS/docs/node_modules/
418M    ./PETERBECOM/preact-cli-peterbecom/node_modules/
418M    ./PETERBECOM/django-peterbecom/adminui0/node_modules/
399M    ./GITHUB/THEHUB/thehub/node_modules/
...

How it works:

  • fd -I -t d node_modules: Find all directories called node_modules but ignore any .gitignore directives in their parent directories.
  • rg -v 'node_modules/(\w|@)': Exclude all finds where the word node_modules/ is followed by a @ or a [a-z0-9] character.
  • xargs du -sh: For each line, run du -sh on it. That's like doing cd some/directory && du -sh, where du means "disk usage" and -s means total and -h means human-readable.
  • sort -hr: Sort by the first column as a "human numeric sort" meaning it understands that "1M" is more than "20K"

Now, if I want to free up some disk space, I can look through the list and if I recognize a project I almost never work on any more, I just send it to rm -fr.

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