🔒 About safety, you can find in this very good article what could happen if your dependencies are not updated when a security issue is found and fixed. By doing so, you'll face less breaking changes at the same time and keep a better control of the changes you'll introduce. I suggest you to update them once every month or at least once every 2 months. How to read and write JSON Files with Node.If you want to keep your project secure, fast and enjoy the latest features of all your dependencies, it's important to keep them regularly up-to-date. References (and Big thanks):ĮTL: Load Data to Destination with Node.js Install latest package version with the flag - npm install for reading and if you have any questions, use the comment function or send me a message you want to know more about Node, have a look at these Node Tutorials.Update individual packages with npm update.Check outdated packages with npm outdated.The NPM registry uses semantic versioning, and packages within the same major version shouldn't break anything, but the ecosystem has no way of enforcing this policy. Hence, don't just blindly update your packages without testing the application. The general rule in software development is Better safe than sorry. Important: Installing the latest version of a package puts the safeties provided by semantic versioning aside and can introduce major code changes into your project. This command will output the current installed versions of all packages, the wanted version ( npm update would want to update to this version), and the latest available version.įor example, we have the following package.json (created with npm init -y and version 4.8.1 of lodash installed): To check if any packages in your Node.js project are outdated, run npm outdated in the root folder (where the package.json file is). Update packages to a specific version or update packages to the latest major release.To update a dependency in a Node.js project you have to follow these steps: One of the best books in software development, sold over 200,000 times. The Pragmatic Programmer: journey to mastery. On a regular basis these records need to be updated to pull the latest compatible version. The package-lock.json is locking/pinning a specific version of a package. Keeping dependencies up-to-date is important, to get the latest security fixes, performance improvements, and general bug fixes for the packages installed. This article is based on Node v16.15.1 and NPM 8.11.0.

Update npm version