$ ❯ CrowderSoup

I am TIRED. I don’t have the energy to write any more code, but I didn’t want to miss writing in my blog. That seemed to be the more important part of doing “100 Days of Indieweb” anyway.

Today I got to work on making a docker container for a NodeJS (TypeScript) app. I’m using multi-layer builds, so that the final image only has the bare minimum of what it needs to run. This is important not just because you don’t want to store more data than you need (storage = money after all), but because the more your production container has the larger the potential attack surface is. It also increases the number of things that could just have bugs and need to be patched, leading to more maintenance overhead.

npm prune

Enter npm prune. In my build step I need to have all the dependencies installed, including the dev dependencies. However, the dev deps aren’t required to actually run the app once it’s built. I was looking for ways to both reduce the size of my container while still keeping build times reasonable.

I could simply re-run npm i --production in a subsequent build step. But that would take longer than just removing the packages I don’t need from node_modules. Thankfully npm prune also has the --production flag!

When run it will prune your node_modules directory, leaving behind only the packages required for production. That one command actually reduced my container size by almost half. I’d say that’s a win.