Release Node Modules Cleaner v1.4.0 · jash90/node-modules-cleaner

Node Modules Cleaner

Desktop application for reclaiming disk space from node_modules folders,
merged Git worktrees, and shared developer caches.

Hide the Dock icon and run as a menu bar app (macOS); closing the window leaves the
app in the menu bar rather than quitting it, and Quit in the tray menu ends it
Live readout of free disk space and worktrees ready to be removed, for a list of
watched folders that now persists between runs — the app's first stored setting
Free space is reported for the volume each watched folder actually lives on, matched
by longest mount point, so a folder on an external disk reports that disk
The worktree count comes from the same merge detection the window uses, minus the
fetch and the size walk, so the background refresh never touches the network and
never crawls node_modules. Refreshes every 15 minutes, on demand, and after a clean
Platform notes: the Dock toggle is macOS-only, tray text is unsupported on Windows
and desktop-dependent on Linux (the menu carries the same information everywhere),
and the Linux .deb now declares its libayatana-appindicator3 runtime dependency

Compare against every base branch a repository has — origin/HEAD plus
origin/main, origin/master, origin/development and origin/develop —
instead of origin/HEAD alone, which reported work merged into a second
integration branch as still open
Detect squash merges, GitHub's default, which never make a branch an ancestor
of its base. The probe writes into a scratch object directory and leaves the
repository's object database untouched
Refresh remote-tracking refs before comparing, with no credential prompts and a
hard timeout, so a branch merged an hour ago is not reported as open
Include worktrees with a detached HEAD; never offer one that holds a base branch
Report registrations whose directory is gone as stale and clear them with
git worktree prune, instead of mislabelling them as having uncommitted changes
Tell untracked OS and watcher noise (.DS_Store, .watchman-cookie-*) apart
from real changes: it is what makes Git refuse, so removal retries once with a
single -f — never two, which is what bypassing a lock would need
Refuse a worktree that gained a commit after the scan, and say which of
"already removed", "changed since scan", "no longer registered" and
"no longer merged" actually happened
Collapse linked worktrees to one entry per real repository, so a directory of
twenty worktrees is inspected once rather than twenty times

Scan directories for node_modules folders and merged Git worktrees
Scan shared developer caches — npm, pnpm, bun, yarn, uv, Gradle, puppeteer, nvm
Detect pnpm stores abandoned when the tool moved its default location
Report what a delete actually frees, not the nominal folder size:
allocated blocks rather than file lengths, hardlinked files counted once,
and files still linked from outside the tree counted as zero
Delegate to a tool's own prune where one exists, so referenced entries survive
Empty unrotated logs in place, keeping the writing service's file handle valid
Batch delete with per-path failure reporting
Cross-platform support