Complete the Hacktoberfest easily and usefully!

Well, I just finished my 4 PRs this year, and got a few questions on how to complete the Hacktoberfest for people that are not used to open-source development.

I have an easy trick to do so. NPM modules are in fact packages that should only contain the actual code, eventual mappings for built code and the package.json file.

Sadly, it is often not the case. It frequently contains a lot of contents that ain't supposed to be in the distributed code. It leads to wasted disk space and network bandwidth.

A simple yet useful way to contribute to the open-source community is to reduce the NPM modules size. To identify which modules needs your help, go to any of your NodeJS project and run the following command:

du -ch -d0 node_modules/*

To focus on the biggest modules, you can filter the output:

du -ch -d0 node_modules/* | grep M

Now we know which modules are too heavy. On the DiagRAMS Technologies API, the heaviest is typescript with 61Mb.

To browse the repository code, just run:

npm repo typescript

Now we can investigate, I think you should avoid big modules like TypeScript for your first PRs since it can be complicated to understand. Most heavy modules are not using the files field in their package.json file.

Once you could identify which files are required and which ain't, you can clone and fork the repository.

# Clone and install
git clone git@github.com:{my_username}/{my_fork}.git;
cd module;
npm i;

# Package the module and see its size

npm pack;
du -h my_fork-x.x.x.tgz

# Add the `file` field to the package.json

# Package the module again and check its new size

npm pack;
du -h my_fork-x.x.x.tgz

# Install the module in your projet and check
# it still works

cd my_project;
npm install my_fork-x.x.x.tgz;
npm test;

Your are now ready to submit your pull-request with the package size before and after your modifications!

Simple, ecological and useful, mission accomplished!

Published at mardi 12 octobre 2021 à 11:07:32.