Package management

List installed packages

npm list

This will return a recursive tree that lists dependencies, dependences of dependencies, … and so on. To limit the depth you can add the --depth= flag. For example to see only your installed packages and their versions use npm list --depth=0.

View package.json data for an installed package

We could go to the NPM registry and view details or we can quickly view the package.json for the dependency with the command npm view [package_name]

We can pinpoint specific dependencies in the package.json, e.g. npm view [package_name] dependencies

View outdated modules

See whether your dependency version is out of date use npm outdated. This gives us a table, for example:

• Latest tells us the latest release available from the developers
• Wanted tells us the version that our package.json rules target. To take the first dependency as an example. We must have set our SemVer syntax to ^0.4.x since it is telling us that there is a minor release that is more recent than the one we have installed but is not advising that we update to the latest major release.
• Current tells us which version we currently have installed regardless of the version that our package.json is targeting or the most recent version available.

Updating

npm update only updates from current to wanted. In other words it only updates in accordance with your caret and tilde rules applied to semantic versioning.