The node_modules folder size is a privilege, not a problem

I used to get mad at the node_modules folder size. How can a JavaScript application be 100, 200MB in size without even me adding any line of code? When I first wrote this, in 2019, I ran npx create-react-app todolist and downloaded 218,7MB of stuff. A real number, I checked.

Create React App is deprecated now (the React team sunset it in February 2025) and points you to a framework, or to a build tool like Vite. A fresh Vite template is a lot leaner: npm create vite@latest todolist -- --template react followed by npm install gives you a 53MB node_modules with 25 packages, as of September 2026. Real apps add a router, a test runner, a UI library, and the folder grows from there.

Whenever you think about the size of node_modules, think about the millions of man hours that we programmers put into it.

This is all Open Source software. Software you can inspect and learn from. Kindly donated by programmers and companies all over the world. It’s a global effort that someone made very simple to benefit from. It happened to be npm, the tool first, and the company next.

We all agreed to publish our code to their servers, and people built things on top, other things on top, until we got to the point that we had quick starters (like a Vite React app or create-vue) that we can use to get lots of power into our hands for free.

Is 200MB too much in the era of TB-order fast storage?

Keep in mind that the vast majority of this size is tests, documentation, and what not. And also the vast majority of the code remaining is only used in the development environment. It’s not like you will serve a 200MB application to the client, I think this is well understood.

Back to the create-react-app example. What was in those 200MB?

To start with, create-react-app contained

• a compiler (Babel)
• a bundler (Webpack)
• a code minifier
• a linter (ESLint)
• a styling pipeline tool (SCSS)
• a development server with live reloading
• a test runner (Jest)

A Vite template today swaps most of those for Rust-based tools: Vite 8 bundles with Rolldown, and the React template ships oxlint instead of ESLint. Fewer megabytes, same idea: a full toolchain for free.

If you want to write a Mac or iPhone application, you have to install Xcode, the IDE provided by Apple. Xcode is (wait for it..) almost 14GB in size. That’s many times the size of node_modules. Granted, we’re comparing two different things, but node_modules contains all you need to start working on your code. You can pair it with VS Code which is 200MB in size, or with Sublime Text which is 30MB - does not matter, no one is even strictly required (while you can’t create an iOS/macOS app without Xcode).

If the concern is your hard disk filling up with modules, pnpm is an optimal drop-in solution which centralizes modules in one location and all your apps use those modules instead of making their own local version. Glitch used the same trick, until it shut down project hosting in July 2025.

I’ve read people wonder how they can audit the codebase for security issues or other problems if our apps rely on too much code written by others.

It’s a choice, right? You are not forced to use modules. You can create your own version of tooling that does not require all those modules, but then you’ll have to maintain that code, test it, manage new releases when things need to be updated, and more work.

I’ve had the opportunity to work with other languages and ecosystem where the vibrancy and opportunities of npm would have been a blessing, and instead I had to build my own little library for everything, as the things I found distributed by 3rd part developers were either non-existent or abandoned since a couple years, and not kept up to date with the rest of the language.

Maybe we could have a flag to only download production code rather than all documentation, tests, and what not? But this is just an idea that came to mind now, not sure how this would be doable.

By the way, if you’re curious how much a specific package adds to your bundle, I built a free package weight checker that also suggests lighter alternatives.

Anyway: long live, node_modules!

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