Got Yarn and NPM installed? Remove cache!

For the past couple of months, one thing has worried me quite a lot: the C drive was taking up too much space. I have a 240GB SSD and was left with only 20GB of free space. I was wondering what was taking up so much space.

During that time, I was learning Docker by doing Brian Holt's Complete Intro to Containers course on FrontendMasters as well as Part 12 on Full Stack Open and blamed the Docker images for taking up so much space, as well as WSL. I was wrong. It was the cache of Yarn and NPM.

Just by running the following commands, I was able to free up 27GB of space:

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yarn cache clean

npm cache clean --f

I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the amount of space I was able to free up. It is now a habit of mine to run these commands every now and then.

As I am focusing on containerizing everything these days, I find it inconvenient to install anything locally. I have begun to appreciate the under-the-hood workings of Docker. To my understanding, the essence of containers consists merely of a few Linux kernel capabilities duct-taped together. It is merely a way to combine a few Linux features to create isolation.