Shrinkhack

The usefulness of this module will (hopefully) be short lived. This works around some bugs in npm to allow you to shrinkwrap without extra manual work.

What?

This module will clean up all extraneous packages in node_modules.

Why?

I <3 Shrinkpack. It's a fantastic tool that has sped up installs for my projects, both locally and in CI.

Unfortunately, there are some problems currently that prevent every project from being able to use it, including some of mine.

Problems

1. Shrinkwrap requires a minimum npm version of 3.10.4

2. npm versions < 3.10.6 && => 3.10.4 have a bug that will install all devDependencies associated with any module you rely on. This means a lot of extraneous dependencies end up in node_modules.

3. Number 2 was fixed in npm 3.10.6. BUT, 3.10.6 introduced a bug that causes dependency trees with cycles to fail during shrinkwrap.

4. npm prune would solve the problem this module addresses, but it has not been updated for the flat dependency tree in npm 3, so it fails to prune all modules that it should.

How?

This module does the following:

1. Run npm list (which does identify the correct list of extraneous packages, unlike npm prune)
2. Removes all those packages from node_modules
3. Runs again, which is necessary due to npm's flat dependency tree. Once a package is removed in a prior run, more dependencies are then identified by npm list as extraneous.