It was released back in 2010, beginning a new era in web development. All the hard and tedious work is done by the package manager, leaving to us only the fun part - the coding itself. For example, with the help of a package manager we can install, uninstall, update, and upgrade packages, configure project settings, run scripts, and so on.

And this is the place where package managers come into play.Ī package manager is a tool that automatically handles a project’s dependencies in a variety of ways. Nowadays, it’s common for even a fairly simple project to have hundreds or thousands of scripts, with complex nested dependencies, which are simply impossible to manage without some kind of automated tool. But since then, the Web has changed drastically.

You'll need to run npm install to update installed packages and in the good old days, a simple text editor was enough for developers to create and manage the large part of their projects. The package npm-check-updates only modifies your package.json file. It's worthwhile noting what packages have been major bumped (those are highlighted in red) as these could cause a break. It should take a minute or so to run and it'll tell you what has been updated. It allows you to download and execute (the 'X' in npx) a node package temporarily on the fly without having to install it on your machine.įire up your terminal of choice and paste this beautiful simple line and hit enter. I love tools that let require little thinking to set up and use, npx is one of them. However, if you have a small project with minimal dependencies and you want to risk it you can do it using npm-check-updates. Major versions (by definition) introduce breaking changes, and NPM, quite rightly, doesn't want to break your project in multiple places in one go. NPM ships with npm update which is excellent for updating minor versions and patches but doesn't handle major versions. I recently wanted/needed to update all my npm dependencies in the package.json file to their latest version.

Npm update