Every developer has had that moment: you run npm install and watch 400MB of packages download, and you wonder — how did we get here? Was it always this big? When did it get bad?

rwnd answers that question. It’s a CLI tool that analyzes any GitHub repo’s git history and charts how dependency directories have grown over time. It supports Node.js, Python, Go, Rust, Ruby, and PHP.

What it doesh2

Point it at a repo and it will:

1. Clone the repo and sample commits across its history
2. Calculate the dependency directory size at each commit (node_modules/, .venv/, vendor/, target/, etc.)
3. Render an ASCII chart showing growth over time
4. Show you which commits caused the biggest jumps
5. Tell you fun facts like “your node_modules is equivalent to 75 floppy disks”

rwnd facebook/react

That’s it. Auto-detects the language from lockfiles and project manifests.

The blame viewh2

My favorite feature is the blame view — it shows which specific commits caused the largest size increases. This is useful when you’re trying to figure out which dependency addition ballooned your install size:

Biggest Size Increases
  1. +18.2 MB   f5cc764 v4.2.1
  2. +10.4 MB   42fd8d3 Add URL support
  3.  +4.1 MB   a89b2c1 Upgrade TypeScript

Combined with the heaviest dependencies list, you get a clear picture of where the weight is and when it arrived.

Smart samplingh2

For repos with thousands of commits, rwnd automatically samples at regular intervals rather than analyzing every single commit. You can override this with --commits to control how many data points you want.

Six languagesh2

Each language measures the right thing:

It also ships with a web UI (rwnd-ui) if you prefer charts over ASCII art.

Install it with npm install -g rwnd and check it out on GitHub.