Package size is 300 Mb

[rumkin]

• Version: 0.38.0
• Platform: Node.JS
• Subsystem:

Type: Overweight

Severity: Medium

Description: Package weight is 336 Mb

Steps to reproduce the error:

npm i ipfs
du -sh node_modules

Current IPFS package weight too much, it takes too long time to install. It hits performance on my pipeline and increases my bundle size dramatically.

[alanshaw]

@rumkin can I check you're quoting the size of your node_modules folder on disk after unzipping all the modules and building all the native deps?

FWIW a browser build of ipfs weighs in at around 600kb currently (which is still big) but is nowhere near 300mb!

Looking at the node_modules directory a lot of this seems to be the published standalone browser builds for each module.

[rumkin]

I've updated steps to reproduce and added size measure step, which is du -sh node_modules. I've also checked bundlephobia to get the size and received 1.5Mb and 465Kb minified, but this numbers are received by manipulation over package source. Not sure how do they get them.

I'm using IPFS as dependency to my electron app. It would be nice you provide instruction how to minify the size or (what's preferrable to me), provide a compiled bundle for node.js.

[daviddias]

Some notes from the twitter thread: https://twitter.com/rumkin/status/1185009479101964288

Suggestion from @hugomrdias https://twitter.com/hugomrdias/status/1185825396551499776

[mikeal]

npm install —production should skip the devDependencies, which you don’t need if you’re just using it as a depedency. That’ll drop the size significantly since aegir accounts for most of the size since it has to pull down a build of headless Chrome.

To test this, go into your project and

rm -rf node_modules
npm install —production

[achingbrain]

npm i in the ipfs/js-ipfs repo gives me a node_modules folder that's over 950MB(!).

npm i --production (or npm install ipfs which is what @rumkin is doing) gives me a node_modules that's 326M.

Of this 326MB, roughly:

• 197MB is folders named dist - e.g browser bundles, minified js & source maps
• 20MB is folders named docs or doc
• 12MB is in folders named test or tests
• 8MB is json - e.g. package.json, etc
• 3.5MB is compiled native code
• 3.5MB is typescript source

[mikeal]

electron app

If you’re concerned about the size of the app you may want to use https://github.com/electron-userland/electron-webpack

If you compile the entire app down with webpack only the code you rely will be there and you can do an electron build without node_modules.

[rumkin]

As the first step I'd suggest to split the package into several:

• IPFS core: for build IPFS into another products.
• IPFS node: for running standalone node as a micro/web-service as a daemon. This is what ipfs package should be, as I think.
• IPFS UI: for node management and inspection. This package could consist of two others: manager and viewer.

In my project I don't need web interface or CLI. The only thing I need is IPFS networking and storage capabilities provided by the core package.

[achingbrain]

I'm not 100% convinced this would solve the size problem.

Just under half of the LOC in /src is CLI/web related and removing them would save about 200KB (unminified & uncompressed) and a few megs of supporting dependencies which granted is not insignificant.

The problem is there's almost 200MB of browser bundles in node_modules which is what the original objection was about and almost all of those are in libp2p-*/ipld-*/ipfs-* modules that IPFS requires to function.

[rumkin]

I don't see how it conflicts with what I propose. CLI and Web pull a bunch of own dependencies like @hapi/hapi, yargs which has their own dependencies and so. Separation would make ipfs package less heavy and faster to install.

This should be moved into separate issue. But I think it should be done anyway. Currently the package is overloaded with responsibilities and tightly coupled.