rimraf-standalone

The UNIX command rm -rf for node.

Rimraf (rm -rf) as a standalone script

This is a fork of the original rimraf, which provides a standalone single-file script. The script is the result of bundling rimraf with its dependencies, using Rollup.

Why? Example #1: to clean node_modules

Many developers would like to use rimraf as part of a "clean" task which deletes all non-source control files in the project, including the node_modules directory. Unfortunately, this has two major downsides:

• Must npm install to have rimraf available for cleaning.
• On some platforms, rimraf of node_modules fails, because the execution of rimraf keeps files open/locked in the node_modules directory.

One workaround is to perform a global install of rimraf, but that violates the principle of a package including any needed development libraries in devDependencies, and breaks if rimraf is installed both globally and in the project.

For a more comprehensive workaround, rimraf-standalone provides rimraf-standalone.js which you can copy to the root of your project, commit in your project, and call from a package script.

If you just want to obtain the standalone script, you don't even need to install this package!

Rather, do something like this:

wget https://unpkg.com/rimraf-standalone/rimraf-standalone.js

Then set up your package script:

  "scripts": {
    "clean": "node rimraf-standalone.js node_modules"
  },

To clean:

npm run clean

How it was bundled

Creating this standalone bundle is a straightforward use of Rollup.js; see the package source files, particularly rollup.config.js, for details.

rimraf was written by Isaac Schlueter, and his name remains in the package.json author field.

This repackaging was done by Kyle Cordes at Oasis Digital.