September 16, 2022

A Cleanup Folders Script for Your package.json

Justin Golden

The Problem

“Have you tried turning it off and on again?” You find yourself deleting the same few folders over and over again to clear the cache, rebuild, or whatever other reason you need to ensure your project is working as expected.

The Solution

1. Create a clean.js file (I store mine in an infrastructure directory at the root of the project):

import fs from 'fs';

const paths = ['.netlify', '.svelte-kit', 'build'];
for (const path of paths) {
	if (fs.existsSync(path)) {
		fs.rmSync(path, { recursive: true });
		console.log(`deleted ${path}`);
	}
}

Of course, change paths to your desired paths to delete. I chose paths for my Svelte Kit + Netlify project.

Feel free to add node_modules here, but just know reinstalling might take some time, and it often doesn’t solve anything that rerunning npm install doesn’t already solve.

Feel free to remove the console.log as well. I like it as confirmation that the command ran and as a reminder of what I deleted.

2. Add it to your package.json scripts:

"clean": "node infrastructure/clean.js",

3. Bonus points: cleanbuild

I like to add a cleanbuild script to run clean, then reinstall (this doesn’t delete node_modules, unless of course you specified that in your clean.js script, then run build and preview to ensure everything is in order in every way):

"cleanbuild": "npm run clean && npm install && npm run build && npm run preview"

Obligatory BE CAREFUL warning: Do NOT put a folder you don’t want deleted. You can delete your project in an instant. Of course, this is why we use git, but I figured it’s worth mentioning for any newbies here.