ndu
Visualize your Node app's disk space usage
Requires node 10.13+ and du
. Windows not yet supported.
ndu
is a tool for analyzing the size of dependencies in a node.js application.
It's similar to disc
, but for server-side
dependencies instead of client-side dependencies.
When building node.js apps, you can choose from hundreds of thousands of libraries available on npm. But sometimes these libraries contain many hidden sub-dependencies that bloat the size of your application. This tool helps you identify which modules are bringing in the bloat. It's very useful when you're wondering why your seemingly simple node app takes up hundreds of MBs of space on disk.
Installation
Install from npm:
npm install --global ndu
Usage
Simply run ndu
in the root folder of your node.js application.
By default it will write an HTML file with the results to stdout:
ndu > ndu.html && open ndu.html
Just like disc
, ndu
can also open the result directly in a browser:
ndu --open
Example
First, let's create a very simple web app using express-generator:
$ npm install -g express-generator
$ express example-web-app
$ cd example-web-app/
$ npm install
Now we have a simple web app built with express.js. Let's see how large the
dependency tree is using ndu
:
$ npm install -g ndu
$ ndu --open
This opens your web browser and shows a breakdown of your app's dependency tree:
From here you can see that your app is using 9.64MB of node dependencies. You can highlight areas of the diagram to see which node dependencies use up that space:
This can be especially helpful in a large application. Sometimes just a few dependencies make up the majority of your application's size.
For example, here's a real application that was running at Groupon. You can easily see how one bloated dependency was increasing the size of the application by 10%:
Thanks to ndu
, it was easy to clean up the largest dependencies and quickly
shrink the size of the app's footprint.
Similar Tools
disc
: For analyzing the size of browserify bundles, platform independentspace-hogs
: Generic directory size info, highlights big entries, *nix- WinDirStat: Generic directory size info, Windows
- Grand Perspective: Generic directory size info, OSX