rank-subdeps

Rank your top-level dependencies by how many transitive subdependencies they bring in.

Install

npm i -g rank-subdeps

Usage

From a project directory (with node_modules installed):

rank-subdeps

Options

| Flag | Description | |------|--------------| | --json | Output machine-readable JSON | | --top N | Show a “Top N” summary (default: 10) | | -h, --help | Show help |

Example output

#  name          wanted(range)  installed  dev?  subdeps
-  ------------- -------------- ---------- ----- -------
1  express       ^4.19.2        4.19.2     no    69
2  typescript    ^5.6.2         5.6.2      yes   10
3  chalk         ^5.3.0         5.3.0      no    2

Top 10 by subdependencies:
 1. express      →  69 subdeps  (4.19.2)
 2. typescript   →  10 subdeps  (5.6.2) [dev]
 3. chalk        →  2 subdeps   (5.3.0)

How it works

The CLI runs:

npm ls --all --json

It then counts unique subdependencies by (name@version) for each top-level dependency (from both dependencies and devDependencies).

License

MIT © 2025 Ēriks Remess