How to Upgrade NPM Dependencies?

Last Updated : 14 Oct, 2024

Upgrading NPM dependencies is important to ensure your NodeJS project is updated with the latest features, bug fixes, and security patches This process guarantees compatibility with modern JavaScript environments and increases performance and stability for your projects.

NPM (Node Package Manager) is an essential tool for managing JavaScript packages when working with NodeJS projects, you often need to upgrade dependencies to keep your project updated, and this article will cover several methods, in Upgrading Dependencies, NPM explains how to handle major and minor version upgrades and guarantee a stable environment for your NodeJS application.

These are the following approaches to upgrade NPM Dependencies:

Table of Content

Why Upgrade NPM Dependencies?

Updating dependencies brings about new code changes, security updates, and new functionality which are the hallmarks of the development of the application, if you do not update, you can have obsolete packages, security violations as well as undesirable situations when utilizing modern approaches to programming, upgrades, done periodically preserve the life of your project and reduce any possible problems in the long run.

Checking Current NPM Dependency Versions

Before Upgrading dependencies, it's important to know which version you have installed, you can check for old packages in your project using the following command.

npm outdated

This will show you a list of dependencies in your project also it indicates which items have a new version.
npm outdated command helps identify which dependencies need to be updated, the output will include information like the current version, the latest available version, and whether it’s a major, minor, or patch update.

Upgrading a Single Dependency

You can upgrade your dependencies to the current version by running this:

npm install <package_name>@latest

For example, if you want to update babel package to its latest version.

npm install babel@latest

This updates package in your node_modules and also updates your package.json to reflect latest version.

Upgrading All Dependencies

To upgrade all dependencies in your project use this:

npm update

This updates minor and patch versions of all dependencies in your package.json file.
If you want to update all packages to their latest major versions (which may introduce breaking changes), use:

npm install  babel@latest

Handling Major, Minor, and Patch Versions

NPM dependencies follow semantic versioning (SemVer), which consists of major, minor, and patch versions-

Major version updates (e.g., 1.0.0 to 2.0.0) may include breaking changes.
Minor version updates (e.g., 1.0.0 to 1.1.0) add new features but maintain backward compatibility.
Patch version updates (e.g., 1.0.0 to 1.0.1) include bug fixes and backward-compatible improvements.

If you want to upgrade only minor and patch versions, you can use:

npm update --save

For upgrading major versions (which may introduce breaking changes), you can install them explicitly:

npm install <package_name>@latest

Automating Dependency Upgrades

For larger projects, manually upgrading dependencies can be time-consuming, you can automate this process using a tool like npm-check-updates also this package allows you to upgrade your all dependencies at once.
To install npm-check-updates globally:

npm install -g npm-check-updates