How to remove all the node_modules folders content

Save space by dropping your old Node modules

I had to transfer a folder full of old projects to a new computer, and after trying to compress it, I realized the size was 8GB. A bit too much for some coding projects that only contain text files.

They were all JavaScript projects, and every project contained a node_modules folder.

The folder is totally unnecessary because I can always run npm install in a project to re-generate it, and most of those projects I had in that folder were old things I’ll never use ever again.

So I decided to remove all the node_modules folders, but they were too many. So I went into the parent folder, which I called dev, and I ran this command in the ZSH terminal, the shell that comes by default with macOS Catalina:

find . -name "node_modules" -type d -prune -exec rm -rf '{}' +

This reduced the size of my folder from 8GB to 2GB. Pretty nice for a one-line command.

I found this command on this blog, there you can find more explanation on the command details.