How to make it a "Framework with a small footprint" again?

Hi all,

CodeIgniter is advertised as a

Framework with a small footprint

But this is only true if you manually clean up all those test, vendor, contribution directories. If you had to run 'composer' you may end up with 20 times more disc space used.
Is there a command (composer dist-clean, spark cleanup,...) command to shrink it automatically or a howto/manual which directories are safe for deletion in production?

My current project has 275 MB after I had to run composer, then I always have to cleanup directory by directory and check whether my app still runs (the files in vendor are pretty critical).
So I delete directory by directory, test my app, restore essential directories again, test the next one and so on. Pretty annoying after every upgrade.

Would be nice  if you have hints how to make an automatic dist export for production with "small footprint" and without all these unit tests and test dependencies that are never used in production.

Kimotu