Intuitively, to update a package using npm, you might assume you need to run something like:
npm update
This command does nothing. The correct command is:
npm install <package name>@latest
As a human being who occasionally needs to update libraries in a software project, I expect my package manager to have some shortcut to do this. I want:
- Determine the latest version for all libraries (or, if specified, a single specific library)
- Said versions installed locally
- The package file (
package.json,requirements.txt, etc.) to be updated with the now-installed version - The package lockfile to be updated
Supposedly this just isn’t possible with npm, according to the first 4 answers in the top Stack Overflow question for this topic. The 5th answer gives us a hint to something that works for doing a package at a time, but needs to resort to xargs to update all packages at once.
npm outdated | cut -d" " -f1 | tail -n +2 | sed 's/$/@latest/' | xargs npm i
🤷