killposer

If you’ve got dozens of PHP projects checked out and haven’t touched most of them in months, their vendor directories are quietly eating your disk. Mine were eating about 20GB of it.

I built killposer to fix that, inspired by npkill for the Node ecosystem. It scans for Composer vendor directories, surfaces the last-touched date and size of each one, then lets you interactively pick which to delete.

It’s easy to install:

# Install globally with Composer and run it
composer global require imliam/killposer
killposer ~/projects

# Alternatively, use CPX to run it immediately
cpx imliam/killposer ~/projects

And even easier to use:

  Scanning for Composer projects... ✓

┌ Select vendor directories to delete ──────────────────────────────┐
│ › ◼ my-app                     · 48.3 MB · 2025-11-02                │
│   ◻ old-api                    · 31.1 MB · 2024-06-14                │
│   ◻ legacy-plugin              · 12.7 MB · 2023-09-30                │
└───────────────────────────────────────── Space to toggle, Enter ─┘

  Delete 1 vendor directory totalling 48.3 MB? No / Yes

  Deleted /home/user/projects/my-app/vendor

The interactive selection matters. A blind find . -name vendor -type d -exec rm -rf {} + would nuke everything - including projects you’re actively working on. killposer gives you the context to make that call.

It’s written in PHP, which means PHP is now helping you delete PHP - pretty meta.

GitHub - imliam/killposer: Interactively find and delete Composer vendor directories to reclaim disk space

Interactively find and delete Composer vendor directories to reclaim disk space - imliam/killposer

github.com