Over time, your project’s dependencies go out of date and you need to invest time into updating the third-party packages. You’ll regularly notice releases that contain new features or bug fixes. There are more ways to update your packages either automatically or with other packages, but this is a super simple one that you can start using today.The development lifecycle of NPM packages is fast. When using the npm-check command we will see the below in our command line allowing us to see what packages we can update. Use the npm-check command to interactively update packages Use npm install -g npm-check to install the package globally. To use npm-check we will install it globally and then we can use the command to interactively update our packages. Instead, npm-check will allow you to interactively check and choose what packages to update.

Now, npm-check will not just update your packages with no regard to the consequences. To update our NPM packages we will reach for another NPM package. Manually updating your packages can be great to reduce the chance of a package breaking your application without you noticing.īut we haven't touched this project in months and we want to get everything up to date that we know won't break our application (and if it does we will suffer the consequences). Because of this, the above command promotes manually updating packages. So if we have a major version change like 1.0.5 to 3.1.3, this command will only update to the highest version before 2.0.0.Ī major version can introduce breaking changes to packages that can break your project. Though this only updates to the latest minor version. NPM does provide a command to update packages. So you need to update all your packages, how can we do that? That's just the speed at which web development moves.

You come back to a 6-month-old project that you haven't touched in a while and now all of your NPM packages are vastly out of date.

Npm update