npm-shrinkwrap.json is too large, could be zipped (compressed)

[RupertBarrow]

Statement

When an npm-shrinkwrap.json file is included in a module, this makes it quite large.
Here is a real world example : when creating small oclif plugins, each plugin (npm module) has its own npm-shrinkwrap.json file which, when added together, count for up to 60% of the total size of the resulting app.

Solution

It would be nice to have an option to generate a compressed version of npm-shrinkwrap.json instead of the expanded version; this could be called npm-shrinkwrap.gz, for example.
The npm tooling would also be able to read these compressed files without any external preliminary decompression.

[ljharb]

It’s already compressed in the tarball. I think npm doesn’t need it after installing, so you could probably remove all shrinkwrap files inside node_modules postinstall, if the disk space is an issue.

(also, the app at dev time is always larger than at runtime; in production, there shouldn’t be anything in node_modules that isn’t used)

[RupertBarrow]

Thanks @ljharb. We're talking about developing plugins here. I'm not authoring them, I'm using them (cf forcedotcom/cli#2835)