rimraf.md

rimraf

rimraf pulls in many transitive dependencies, and can often be replaced with built-in Node APIs.

Alternatives

NodeJS (since v12.x / v14.x)

Node.js v14.14 and up supports the fs.rm function, which allows files and directories to be deleted recursively:

import { rm } from 'node:fs/promises';
import { rmSync } from 'node:fs';

// This will throw an error if the path does not exist.
await rm(path, { recursive: true });
rmSync(path, { recursive: true });

// This will do nothing if the path does not exist.
await rm(path, { recursive: true, force: true });
rmSync(path, { recursive: true, force: true });

If you need to support Node 12, you can use fs.rmdir, which also has the recursive option available since Node v12.10, although it will print a deprecation message in Node v14 and up:

const { rmdir } = require('fs').promises;
const { rmdirSync } = require('fs');

async function main() {
    await rmdir(path, { recursive: true });
}

rmdirSync(path, { recursive: true });

For command-line usage, such as npm scripts, you can run Node in eval mode:

node -e "fs.rmSync('./foo', { recursive: true, force: true })"

premove (Node 8.x and up)

For command-line usage across runtimes (to support developers who use alternative runtimes and may not have the node command available), the premove package includes a CLI.

premove also supports older versions of Node (v8.x and up) than fs.rm does.