killposer

Iinteractively find and delete Composer vendor/ directories to reclaim disk space - like npkill but for PHP.

$ killposer ~/projects

  Scanning for Composer projects... ✓

┌ Select vendor directories to delete ──────────────────────────────┐
│ › ◼ my-app                     · 48.3 MB · 2025-11-02                │
│   ◻ old-api                    · 31.1 MB · 2024-06-14                │
│   ◻ legacy-plugin              · 12.7 MB · 2023-09-30                │
└───────────────────────────────────────── Space to toggle, Enter ─┘

  Delete 1 vendor directory totalling 48.3 MB? No / Yes

  Deleted /home/user/projects/my-app/vendor

Installation

killposer requires PHP 8.4+. Using Composer, you can install it globally with the following command:

composer global require imliam/killposer

Alternatively, you can use cpx to run killposer without installing it:

cpx imliam/killposer ~/projects

Usage

killposer [options] [<path>]

Argument / Option	Description	Default
path	Directory to scan	Current working directory
--depth=N	Maximum directory depth to scan	2
-f, --force	Delete without confirmation prompt	-

Scan the current directory:

killposer

Scan a specific path:

killposer ~/projects

Scan deeper (e.g. a monorepo with nested packages):

killposer ~/projects --depth=4

Delete without a confirmation prompt (e.g. in a script):

killposer ~/projects --force

How it works

killposer walks the given directory up to --depth levels deep, looking for folders that contain both a composer.json and a vendor/ directory. Results are sorted by vendor size (largest first) so the biggest wins are at the top.

Once you confirm, it deletes only the vendor/ directory - your source code is untouched. Run composer install in any project to restore it.