In our quest for smoother long term maintenance and hardened security footprint, we wanted to let folks know that we’ve made even more exciting dependency simplification improvements on the v4 canary prereleases!
Notably when comparing v4.0.0-alpha.6 to v3.1.2, we’ve:
- Reduced our total dependency count from
134to105(21.6%) - Dropped third-party dependency count from
123to89(27.6%) - Decreased
node_modulesweight from21 MiBto14 MiB(33.3%)
Full History
Here’s how things have looked over the full length of the project:
| Version | Deps (3rd-party) | Change | node_modules Size |
Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
v0.2.0 (2018 January) First npm release! |
×401 (400) |
- | 51 MiB |
- |
v0.12.1 (2021 March) |
×362 (360) |
9.7% | 68 MiB |
33.3% |
v1.0.2 (2022 August) |
×360 (357) |
0.5% | 71 MiB |
4.4% |
v2.0.1 (2023 March) |
×213 (208) |
40.8% | 35 MiB |
50.7% |
v3.0.0 (2024 October) |
×187 (174) |
12.2% | 27 MiB |
22.8% |
v3.1.2 (2025 June) |
×134 (123) |
28.3% | 21 MiB |
22.2% |
v4.0.0-alpha.1 (2025 July) |
×130 (116) |
2.9% | 16 MiB |
23.8% |
v4.0.0-alpha.6 (2025 December) |
×105 (89) |
19.2% | 14 MiB |
12.5% |
- Numbers were compiled via fresh install of Eleventy core in a new directory (with
npm@11.7.0and Nodev24.11.1). npm ls --omit=dev --all --parseable | wc -lprovided the dependency count (minus one for the root directory).node_modulesfolder sizes viadu -m node_modules.