Package footprint/size

[bvego]

Hi everyone!

I tried searching for discussions on this but couldn’t find any. Please redirect me if there is a active discussion on this topic.

When installing storybook I noticed it pulls in a lot of dependencies.

For example, running npx storybook@latest init in an empty project (Node v21.6.0, MacOS, React/Vite) results in a package-lock.json with nearly 9,000 lines and a node_modules folder of 231MB.

In a large React project I'm working on, adding Storybook increased node_modules by 110MB and the package-lock diff by ~6,000 lines.

Using a package visualization tool (like this one) it shows that storybook pulls in around 440 packages.

My question is: are there plans to improve this? I understand that most of this size is backend/CLI functionality that doesn’t reach the browser, but I really think this is something we can do better in the JS community.

Would you accept PRs aimed at reducing the package footprint? Here are a few ideas:

• Replace chalk with picocolors
• I noticed that util was a dependency, but from first sight only the promisify function is being used. promisify is something that can be imported from node:util when used on the backend or replaced with a more "modern" (lightweight) equivalent
• A big chunk of the dependencies are a result of jscodeshift. How about moving the migration codemod to a separate package so that it is run on a per-need basis (i.e. npx @storybook/migrate)
• ...Probably a lot of other things, but wanted to get a sentiment from the community/maintainers before investigating further