Node Modules Cleaner

Node Modules Cleaner is a cross-platform desktop app that scans your filesystem for node_modules folders, tells you exactly how much space each one is eating, and lets you delete the ones you no longer need. It is the JavaScript-developer disk-space tax, refunded.

The problem

Anyone who has worked on more than three Node projects knows the feeling: 80 GB of disk gone, mostly to node_modules folders from projects you have not opened in months. du -sh */node_modules works on macOS and Linux, but it is slow, single-threaded, and gives you no UI to pick what to keep. Node Modules Cleaner does this properly.

What it does

• Parallel scanning — recursive directory walk runs on Rust’s Rayon thread pool, so a 200 GB home folder is mapped in seconds, not minutes.
• Size analysis — every node_modules folder shows its on-disk size; click a column header to sort by size, by path, or by package manager.
• Top-packages detection — parses each project’s package.json and surfaces the headline technologies (React, Next.js, Vue, Express, NestJS, etc.) as badges so you can tell projects apart at a glance.
• Package-manager detection — looks for package-lock.json, yarn.lock, pnpm-lock.yaml or bun.lockb and tags each folder accordingly.
• Selective deletion — checkboxes per folder; the app deletes only what you explicitly picked, with a confirmation step.
• Cross-platform — native installers for Windows (x64), macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon) and Linux (deb, rpm, AppImage). Tauri keeps the binary small.

Tech stack

• Shell: Tauri 2 + Rust (Rayon for parallel I/O, native plugins for filesystem and shell)
• App: React 19 + TypeScript (strict) + Vite
• Styling: Tailwind CSS
• Tooling: ESLint + typescript-eslint + react-hooks plugin