Powerful NPM

NPM is one of the first tools or command-line utitiles that developers learn to use but most of us just learn the basic commands like npm install or npm run start. However, there are more things you can do with npm than just installing packages and starting your application.

Let's start from the definition.

What is NPM?

Node Package Manager is an online repository for publishing open-source Node.js projects. It also has command-line tools to help you install packages and mange dependencies.

Useful commands

  • npm test - to run your tests
  • npm build - to build your project
  • npm start - to run your project locally

Check for outdated packages

The reason for this blog post is to share my experience with npm and how it helped me solve an issue with outdated packages.

A few months ago I decided to go back to one of my projects and add a new feature. So I cloned the repository, installed packages with npm install, started up the project but it did not start. I read through the error message and figured out it had something to do with a version number of one the packages. After some trial and error, google searching I found this npm command that can be very useful in similar cases.

npm outdated

If you run npm outdated in the root of your project, it will show you a list of the installed packages like this:

List of installed packagesList of installed packages

What do these color represent?

  • 🔴 Red 🔴 means there's a newer version matching your semver requirements, so you should update now.
  • 🚸 Yellow 🚸 indicates that there's a newer version about your semver requirements (usually new major, or new 0.x minor) so proceed with caution.

Did you say SEMVER?

Yeah, semver stands for Semantic Versioning. For example:

MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH > 1.0.3

Be careful when updating packages, because some changes can cause incompatibilites. A change in the MAJOR version number has incompatible changes. A change in the MINOR version has new backward-compatible features. And lastly, a PATCH version number update includes backward-compatible bug fixes.

The more you knowThe more you know!


Ok, so now that you have the list of outdated packages it's time to update them.

npm update

This command will update all the packages to the latest version respecting the semver constraints. The easy way of updating all packages is by running the command: npm update. Have in mind that this will not update to MAJOR versions. In the case you want to update a specific package to the latest version, even to the latest MAJOR version, use npm install package-name.


Credits & References

npm Docs

npm outdated

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