Discussion: reducing the install footprint

[knolleary]

An npm install of node-red-nodegen results in 265Mb of node_modules. If you npm install the repository (so devDependencies are included) it's over 650Mb.

I would like to see if we can reduce this overhead. This issue is a summary of what is using the space - and to explore what we can do about it.

Here are the current dependencies and how much they contribute to node_modules:

Size	Module
40	js-string-escape
128	csv-string
184	colors
192	minimist
320	mustache
1040	axios
2720	yamljs
3736	ajv
31008	swagger-js-codegen-formdata
51464	javascript-obfuscator
76464	jimp
200344	api-spec-converter
405144	cldr

The main offender is cldr (198Mb) - which is used by the WoT node to determine the text direction of some part of text. I don't know enough about the WoT code to know how important this is and whether it can be changed to be a command-line argument the user provides instead of it being determined by inspecting the codepages of the content.

api-spec-converter (98Mb) is used by the Swagger node to handle the different versions of the OpenAPI spec. swagger-js-codegen-formdata (15Mb) is the core functionality for the Swagger generator - can't avoid that.

jimp (37Mb) is used by all nodes to check the size of the icon, and to resize it if needed. Personally, I think we can do without this code and just use the image provided. If we keep it, it needs to be updated to reflect we support svg, font-awesome and the images can be any size as long as they have a 1:2 ratio.

javascript-obfuscator (25Mb) is a lot of code for functionality I don't really care for. Obfuscation doesn't provide any real security and is easily undone.

Another option to consider is making them separate nodegen tools - rather than all bundled into the one. That'll minimise the overhead for users who are only interested in one or other of the modes.

[k-toumura]

The main offender is cldr (198Mb) - which is used by the WoT node to determine the text direction of some part of text. I don't know enough about the WoT code to know how important this is and whether it can be changed to be a command-line argument the user provides instead of it being determined by inspecting the codepages of the content.

It is overkill that using cldr to just find a text direction from a locale ID... I'll update to use other smaller npm module (for example, rtl-detect).

[k-toumura]

I made a pull request #116 which eliminates dependency on cldr.