Save disk space with Yarn

Yarn is a fast, reliable and secure replacement for npm. Those are all important attributes in my book for a tool I use daily for development, but that's not all Yarn offers.

The node_modules directory is often a resource consuming hog both in space and number of files. It is full of junk such as test files, build scripts and example directories.

To clean some of those files Yarn offers the clean command. To run it:

yarn clean

Once run, the command will create a .yarnclean file with patterns of type of files to be deleted. By default yarn clean will delete the following:

# test directories
__tests__
test
tests
powered-test

# asset directories
docs
doc
website
images
assets

# examples
example
examples

# code coverage directories
coverage
.nyc_output

# build scripts
Makefile
Gulpfile.js
Gruntfile.js

# configs
.tern-project
.gitattributes
.editorconfig
.*ignore
.eslintrc
.jshintrc
.flowconfig
.documentup.json
.yarn-metadata.json
.*.yml
*.yml

# misc
*.gz
*.md

With this file in your project root directory Yarn will ensure to run a cleaning task after every install and report how much space it saved you.