How to Update a Node dependency from npm

When you install Node, you also get npm, which is the official package manager for Node.
You can use npm to install dependencies that other people wrote for you to use in your project.
Over time, these dependencies get updates and you'll want to update them so keep up with the latest versions.
In this post, we'll learn how to update our dependencies with npm.
Check for outdated dependencies
Before we update our dependencies, we need to check if there are any outdated dependencies.
You can do this by running this command:
npm outdated
This command will list all the dependencies that are outdated. Simply run it in the root of your project, the same place where your package.json
file is located.
Now that we know how to check for outdated dependencies, let's update our dependencies.
Updating outdated dependencies
You can update a specific dependency by running this command:
npm update <dependency>
For example, if you wanted to update the react
dependency, you would run this command:
npm update react
If your package is installed globally, you will need to apply the --global
flag to it:
npm update --global react
When you run any of these commands, npm will automatically update the dependency, package.json
and your node_modules
folder.
You can update all the dependencies at once by running this command:
npm update
By omitting the <dependency>
argument, npm interprets it as you wanting to update all the dependencies.
Finally, you can choose what version specifically you want to update a dependency to by appending the version to it.
For example, here's how to update react
to the latest version:
npm update react@latest
Conclusion
In this post, we learned how to update our dependencies with npm.
You can first verify which packages are outdated, then update them one by one, or all at once.
Hopefully this post has been helpful to you. Thanks for reading!
If you want to learn about web development, founding a start-up, bootstrapping a SaaS, and more, follow me on X! You can also join the conversation over at our official Discord!
Leave us a message!