node_modules-disk-image

This is a macOS-only tool that creates a disk image to put node_modules in.

This allows node_modules to be treated as a single file, resulting in these benefits:

• Spotlight won't go crazy indexing the contents in the background.
• Your Spotlight search results won't be cluttered with irrelevant files.
• Disk management tools will be able to calculate the "folder" size instantly. When calculating which disk usage across your computer, tools like GrandPerspective won't take 5-10 seconds calculating the size of each node_modules you have. tens of thousands of tiny files are copied individually.

This tool can't make your node_modules folder smaller, but at least it can stop it from being annoying in other ways!

Usage

To install:
Clone this repo and give yourself an easy way to run bin/nmg from anywhere.

The easiest way is to add bin/ to $PATH:

To do this in fish, run: fish_add_path bin

In other shells, add export PATH="$PATH:path/to/cloned/repo/bin" to your shell profile or rc file.

To set up for a repo:
Run nmg init to create the node_modules disk image. Then, if you have an existing node_modules folder, run nmg migrate to move it over to this new system.

Now everything is set up!
Run nmg mount to mount the disk image, and nmg unmount to unmount it. (You can also click the eject button in Finder.)

Related

Seen something similar before? Electron apps like Slack and VSCode also they pack their node_modules into a single file, an asar archive. However, it requires a patch to trick Node into thinking it's a normal folder, so it only works in Electron. Even if hypothetically that patch was upstreamed, the asar format is read-only, so you can't install new packages.