🧹 Node Modules Sanitizer

A blazing-fast tool to analyze and clean up node_modules directories by removing unnecessary files.

🎯 Why This Project?

The Problem

node_modules directories often contain unnecessary files that bloat your project size:

• TypeScript source files (.ts, .tsx) that are only needed during development
• Documentation files (.md) and examples
• Source maps (.map) used for debugging
• Test files that aren't needed in production

The Solution

This tool helps you identify and remove these files, which is especially useful for:

• 🐳 Docker Images - Reduce Docker image size significantly by cleaning node_modules before building the image. Smaller images mean:

  • Faster deployment and scaling
  • Reduced storage costs
  • Quicker CI/CD pipelines
  • Lower bandwidth usage

• ☁️ Serverless Functions - Stay within size limits and improve cold start times

• 💾 Storage Optimization - Free up disk space on development machines and CI/CD runners

• 📦 Distribution - Smaller package sizes for faster downloads and installations

Real Impact

A typical node_modules folder can be reduced by 30-50% by removing development-only files. For a 500MB node_modules, that's 150-250MB saved per Docker image!

✨ Features

• 🔍 Analyze - Scan your node_modules to see how much space can be freed
• 🧹 Clean - Remove unnecessary files (.ts, .tsx, .md, .html, .map, test files)
• ⚡ Fast - Built with Rust for maximum performance
• 🛡️ Safe - Only removes non-essential files that aren't needed for runtime

📦 Installation

cargo install --path .

Or build from source:

cargo build --release

The binary will be available as nmz in target/release/.

🚀 Usage

🔍 Analyze mode

See how much space can be freed without making any changes:

nmz --analyze

With custom path:

nmz --analyze --path ./my-project/node_modules

🧹 Clean mode

Remove unnecessary files from node_modules:

nmz

With custom path:

nmz --path ./my-project/node_modules

🗑️ What gets removed?

The tool removes the following file types that are typically not needed in production:

• *.ts - TypeScript source files
• *.tsx - TypeScript JSX files
• *.md - Markdown documentation
• *.html - HTML files
• *.map - Source map files
• *.test.* - Test files

📊 Example output

Analyze mode:

┌──────────┬─────────────┬────────────┐
│ Pattern  │ Files count │ Total size │
├──────────┼─────────────┼────────────┤
│ *.ts     │ 1245        │ 45.2 MB    │
│ *.tsx    │ 342         │ 12.8 MB    │
│ *.md     │ 892         │ 3.4 MB     │
│ *.html   │ 156         │ 892.5 KB   │
│ *.map    │ 2341        │ 89.7 MB    │
│ *.test.* │ 567         │ 23.1 MB    │
└──────────┴─────────────┴────────────┘

we can safely reduce the size of the node_modules folder by 174.3 MB

⚡ Performance

Built with Rust and optimized for speed:

• 🔄 Parallel file processing with Rayon
• 🎯 Efficient glob pattern matching
• 🚀 LTO and strip optimizations enabled in release builds

📄 License

MIT

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request.