getLastNpmInstall()

September 9th, 2020 · From Writing a debug script

For debugging purposes, I needed to figure out when were node_modules last installed. It turns out to be surprisingly tricky to do.

The gist is to read the birthtime of a directory in the node_modules folder (here moment as an example). Note that upon installation, the node_modules folder is emptied and not recreated, so it shouldn’t be used to determine creation date.

const { stat } = require('fs')
const { promisify } = require('util')
const moment = require('moment')
const getStats = promisify(stat)

const getLastNpmInstall = () => {
  const stats = await getStats('./node_modules/moment')
  const lastInstall = moment(stats.birthtime)

  return lastInstall.fromNow() // E.g. 3 days
}