How to keep your npm dependencies updated

How to keep your npm dependencies updated

It's always a good idea to keep dependencies updated, from performance gains to fixing security issues, it just makes sense to update.

But your project might depend on a lot of dependencies and if you haven't worked on a project for a few months, chances are a lot of these dependencies are really outdated.

List all outdated dependencies

You can run the command npm outdated to get a list of all the dependencies that have new releases.

outdated.png

Check for updates

Now that we know how to check for outdated packages, we need to find a way to update them all. This is where we need help from a package called npm-check-updates. This package will look into your package.json versions and upgrade all the outdated ones.

npm install -g npm-check-updates

Note: You should install this package globally so you can use on other projects.

Upgrading and updating dependencies

After installing the package you need to run ncu -u on your terminal to upgrade your package.json.

updated-list.png

You can now run the command npm update to update your dependencies.

Updating dependencies in one go

So we have seen that we can upgrade our dependencies with ncu -u and then upgrade them with npm update. How about we create a command that will run both of these so we don't have to type so much?

That's when aliases come in handy!

I keep all my aliases in a .bash_aliases file, in my home directory. You can add this alias anywhere, for example, ~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, ~/.bash_profile, etc. If you don't know which to use, you can use ~/.bash_profile or ~/.profile.

Open the file in your favourite editor and add the following alias:

 alias update='ncu -u && npm update'

Source that file or restart your terminal and you can now use the update command to update your dependencies in one go!