Why node_modules Are a Pain

If you build websites or apps with JavaScript, you know the drill:

• Every project gets its own huge node_modules folder
• These folders are chunky - often 200MB to 500MB each
• Old projects you forgot about still hog your disk space
• Finding and deleting them by hand is boring and takes forever

What's npkill?

npkill is a simple tool that finds and helps you delete node_modules folders with just a few keystrokes.

How to Use npkill

Step 1: Run the Tool

The easiest way is to use npx, which lets you run it without installing anything:

npx npkill

This starts looking from where you are. To scan a specific folder:

npx npkill -d ~/projects

Step 2: Check Out What It Finds

npkill shows you a list with:

• All the node_modules folders it found
• How much space each one takes up
• When you last used them
• Easy controls to delete them

Step 3: Delete What You Don't Need

It's super easy to clean up:

1. Use up/down arrows to move through the list
2. Hit SPACE to mark a folder you want to delete
3. Press d to delete the folder right away
4. Press q to quit when you're done

Cool Tricks

npkill can do more than just find node_modules:

See biggest folders first

npx npkill --sort-by size

Skip folders you want to keep

npx npkill -e vendor,backup

Delete other folders too: Like dist or build folders

npx npkill -f dist,build

Tips for Better Cleanup

1. Look at the dates - If you haven't touched a project in months, it's safe to delete
2. Don't worry about mistakes - You can always run npm install later if you need those files again
3. Do this every few months - Make it a habit when your disk gets full

For projects you're still using, try:

npm prune

This cleans up unused stuff without deleting everything

That's it!

With npkill, you can free up tons of space in just a few minutes. It's amazing how much disk space you can get back by cleaning up these folders!

Next time your computer slows down or you get a "disk full" message, give npkill a try - your computer will thank you!

My first choice was scp and I ended up with something like this:

scp -r [email protected]:/home/ploi/[website_folder]/users/ ~/Documents/Projects/[local_project_folder]/

But on one of the sites, I have A LOT of files and scp is single-threaded and took forever.

So, I decided to look into rsync and came up with this

rsync -avz -e ssh [email protected]:/home/ploi/[website_folder]/content/ ~/Documents/Projects/[local_project_folder]/content/

Here's an overview of the command above:

• -a: Archive mode. It preserves symbolic links, permissions, timestamps, and more.
• -v: Verbose mode. It shows you detailed output during the transfer.
• -z: Enables compression during the transfer.
• -e ssh: Specifies that SSH should be used for the data transfer.

In the end, using rsync made the files sync 5x faster!

Velja – A simple tool to open links in specific browsers or apps based on customizable rules. Supports removing tracking parameters, handling short URLs, and integrating with various workflows. Trusted by over 130K users for efficient link management.

Feedbin – A customizable RSS reader to organize and enjoy feeds, podcasts, YouTube channels, and newsletters all in one place. Clean themes, full-text extracts, and powerful search ensure a seamless reading experience. Sync across apps. Free 30-day trial, then $5/month!

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Almost 500 visitors so far since launch, surreal!

Since launch I added:

• Individual technology pages
• Search
• 404 and privacy policy pages
• A price range indicator to the resource card component
• A blog and published my first blog post
• UTM params so authors know when I'm sending them traffic

It's a directory of high-quality books and video courses for developers, all from indie authors. The kind that go beyond the typical "Learn X in 2 hours" tutorials.

What's in it:
• 45+ carefully curated resources (more coming soon!)
• Focus on intermediate/advanced level content
• Hand-picked from various tech stacks

One thing that was worrying me was the backups. We were just doing it on the same server, but that's NOT good security. So, I looked into moving them somewhere else and saw that Pocketbase offers this feature.

You can store your backups in any S3-compatible storage. Since we were using Cloudflare for other stuff, we decided to try to make it work with R2.

After some trial and error, we figured out how to fill out the fields, here's how it works:

• Bucket: name of the bucket in R2, in my case, it was backups
• Region: set it to auto
• Endpoint: Cloudflare gives you this; it's usually in this format https://[CLOUDFLARE_ID].r2.cloudflarestorage.com
• Access key: Cloudflare gives you this once you create your R2 token
• Secret: Cloudflare gives you this once you create your R2 token

For the Endpoint, Access key, and Secret, you need to create an R2 API token in Cloudflare, here's how to do it in late 2024

That's it. Now, all our backups are done daily and sent to our bucket in R2.

alias npmup="npx npm-check-updates -u && npm i"

But now that I'm slowly switching to pnpm I wanted an equivalent, and luckily pnpm has this functionality out of the box with the up command.

Here's how I have it now:

alias npmup="pnpm up --latest && pnpm install"

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I mainly run Vite, Queues, Logs, and a Stripe CLI listener. But after I got everything set up, I got annoyed by a tiny detail: only the Vite tab had color highlighting. Bummer!

After googling around, I found that, for the Queues and Logs artisan commands, I could pass the --ansi flag to output colors in a format Solo can understand.

And for the Stripe CLI command (which I'm running through NPM) you can set a --color=on flag.

Here's how my setup looked:

// SoloServiceProvider.php
<?php

namespace App\Providers;

use AaronFrancis\Solo\Commands\EnhancedTailCommand;
use AaronFrancis\Solo\Facades\Solo;
use Illuminate\Support\ServiceProvider;

class SoloServiceProvider extends ServiceProvider
{
    public function register()
    {
        if (class_exists('\AaronFrancis\Solo\Manager')) {
            $this->configure();
        }
    }

    public function configure()
    {
        Solo::useTheme('dark')
            ->addCommands([
                'Vite' => 'npm run dev',
                'Stripe' => 'npm run stripe -- --color=on',
                'Queue' => 'php artisan queue:work --ansi',
                'Logs' => 'php artisan pail --ansi',
            ])
            ->addLazyCommands([])
            ->allowCommandsAddedFrom([]);
    }

    public function boot()
    {
    
    }
}

#!/bin/bash

# Default values
PANTHEON_SITE=""
LOCAL_PROJECT_FOLDER=""
ENVIRONMENT="live" # Default environment

# Parse command line options
while [ "$#" -gt 0 ]; do
  case "$1" in
    --pantheon-site=*)
      PANTHEON_SITE="${1#*=}"
      ;;
    --local-project-folder=*)
      LOCAL_PROJECT_FOLDER="${1#*=}"
      ;;
    --env=*)
      ENVIRONMENT="${1#*=}"
      ;;
    *)
      echo "Unknown option: $1"
      exit 1
      ;;
  esac
  shift
done

# Check if required options are set
if [ -z "$PANTHEON_SITE" ] || [ -z "$LOCAL_PROJECT_FOLDER" ]; then
  echo "Usage: $0 --pantheon-site=<PANTHEON_SITE> --local-project-folder=<LOCAL_PROJECT_FOLDER> [--env=<ENVIRONMENT>]"
  exit 1
fi

# Create a backup of the files
echo "Creating a backup of the $ENVIRONMENT files..."
terminus backup:create --element=files $PANTHEON_SITE.$ENVIRONMENT

echo "Downloading $ENVIRONMENT files from Pantheon..."
# Download the files from the specified environment
FILES_ZIP_FILE="$HOME/pantheon-local-copies/files/$PANTHEON_SITE-files.tgz"
terminus backup:get --element=files --to=$FILES_ZIP_FILE $PANTHEON_SITE.$ENVIRONMENT

# Check if the files archive exists before extracting
if [ -f "$FILES_ZIP_FILE" ]; then
  echo "Extracting files to the local project folder..."
  gunzip -c $FILES_ZIP_FILE | tar -xv --strip-components=1 -C "$HOME/Documents/Projects/$LOCAL_PROJECT_FOLDER/web/app/uploads"
else
  echo "Error: Files archive not found at $FILES_ZIP_FILE"
  exit 1
fi

echo "Cleaning up..."
# Remove the dump file after import
rm $FILES_ZIP_FILE

echo "Files synchronization complete."

Then I add a command alias to my zsh settings

alias syncpfiles="~/scripts/sync-db.sh"

And I run the command as the following

syncpfiles --pantheon-site=testname --local-project-folder=testname --env=live

Each Pantheon site has 3 environments: Dev, Test and Live.

When we deploy it goes to Dev and then we manually deploy to Test and then to Live.

We switch between projects a lot so sometimes I haven't touched a particular project in a while and my local environment does not reflect what is currently on Pantheon.

At the beginning I used to do the sync process manually by creating a DB backup and importing it locally via Tableplus but it was a tedious process.

So I decided to automate it by writing a script and I want to share it here:

#!/bin/bash

# Default values
PANTHEON_SITE=""
LOCAL_DB_NAME=""
ENVIRONMENT="live" # Default environment
DB_DUMP_FILE="$HOME/pantheon-local-copies/db/$PANTHEON_SITE-db.tgz" # Default dump file path


# Parse command line options
while [ "$#" -gt 0 ]; do
  case "$1" in
    --pantheon-site=*)
      PANTHEON_SITE="${1#*=}"
      ;;
    --local-db=*)
      LOCAL_DB_NAME="${1#*=}"
      ;;
    --env=*)
      ENVIRONMENT="${1#*=}"
      ;;
    *)
      echo "Unknown option: $1"
      exit 1
      ;;
  esac
  shift
done

# Check if required options are set
if [ -z "$PANTHEON_SITE" ] || [ -z "$LOCAL_DB_NAME" ]; then
  echo "Usage: $0 --pantheon-site=<PANTHEON_SITE> --local-db=<LOCAL_DB_NAME> [--env=<ENVIRONMENT>]"
  exit 1
fi

# Ensure PANTHEON_SITE is not empty
if [ -z "$PANTHEON_SITE" ]; then
  echo "Error: PANTHEON_SITE is not set. Please provide a valid site name."
  exit 1
fi

# Create a backup of the database
echo "Creating a backup of the $ENVIRONMENT database..."
terminus backup:create --element=db $PANTHEON_SITE.$ENVIRONMENT

echo "Downloading $ENVIRONMENT database from Pantheon..."
# Download the database from the specified environment
DB_DUMP_FILE="$HOME/pantheon-local-copies/db/$PANTHEON_SITE-db.tgz"
terminus backup:get --element=db --to=$DB_DUMP_FILE $PANTHEON_SITE.$ENVIRONMENT

MYSQL_USER="root"
MYSQL_PASSWORD="" # Assuming no password
DB_DUMP_FILE="$HOME/pantheon-local-copies/db/$PANTHEON_SITE-db.tgz"

# Check if the dump file exists before decompressing
if [ -f "$DB_DUMP_FILE" ]; then
  echo "Decompressing database dump..."
  gunzip -c $DB_DUMP_FILE > "${DB_DUMP_FILE%.tgz}.sql"
else
  echo "Error: Database dump file not found at $DB_DUMP_FILE"
  exit 1
fi

DB_SQL_FILE="${DB_DUMP_FILE%.tgz}.sql"

echo "Importing database into local MySQL..."
# Use mysql command to import the database
mysql -h 127.0.0.1 -P 3306 -u $MYSQL_USER $LOCAL_DB_NAME < $DB_SQL_FILE

echo "Cleaning up..."
# Remove the dump file after import
rm $DB_DUMP_FILE
rm $DB_SQL_FILE

echo "Database synchronization complete."

Then I add a command alias to my zsh settings

alias syncpdb="~/scripts/sync-db.sh"

And I run the command as the following

syncpdb --pantheon-site=testname --local-db=testname --env=dev

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