NPU maintains semantic versioning policies, so you can quickly identify patches, minor updates, or major updates that need fixing. The existing version is on the left and the latest version is on the right. This will return a list of packages that need to be updated. Run NPM Check Updates.Ĭd to a directory with your project and run the following command. Note: Access the full docs for NPM Check Updates. (Alternatively, you can run it with NPX.) npm install -g npm-check-updates It’s often best to just install NPM check updates globally.

NPM Check Updates is a CLI that will help you safely make those updates. The package will be present under the node_modules folder and in the package.json file with a version number prefixed with the ^ character (which has a pair: ~).When you come back to an old web dev project, it’s important to update your packages to get new features, bug fixes, and security patches.

The point here is that this command will install the named package’s latest safe version with dependencies if they aren’t present in the node_modules folder and the package-lock.json file. The command has a lot of flags for more information, please visit the official site. To install a package, we have to use the following command: npm install sass PATCH version (x.x.3), backward compatible bug fixes.MINOR version (x.2.x), which adds new functionality, but it is backward compatible.MAJOR version (1.x.x), which can contain breaking changes, more significant updates.The semantic versioning means that we have a version number (1.2.3) with three digits: And this is the point where versioning is critical because it is easy to break things. There is a tremendous dependency in any project that we don’t know about. If you check the size of the node_modules folder in any of your projects, you will see the tens of thousands of files and the vast physical size.

Managing packages is a big deal in modern development. To understand the package updating mechanism, first, we have to understand the versioning and the nature of npm. Updating npm dependencies isn’t a big task, but sometimes it can be more complicated depending on our needs.

Update npm version