Does package.json "latest" versions include beta?

Question

In package.json you can specify a package to be synced with the latest version:

{
   ...,
   "devDependencies": {
      "gulp": "latest",
      ...
   },
   ...
}

Does "latest" include the alpha or beta versions, or just the latest stable version? I couldn't find definitive documentation on this.

Answer 1

The maintainers get to set the 'latest' tag to whatever they want. To wit:

@mac:~/projects/client$ npm outdated
Package       Current        Wanted        Latest  Location
bourbon         4.2.6         4.2.6  5.0.0-beta.2  
webpack  2.1.0-beta.4  2.1.0-beta.4       1.12.14 

'Latest' is set to the beta on bourbon, but webpack still has the stable as 'latest'.

There's also a tag 'next' that some maintainers use for prerelease version.

Answer 2

By default, NPM dependencies are pulled from the NPM repository. Authors must manually upload new versions of their software to the NPM repository, so the "@latest" version of the code hosted on NPM is different from the latest version of the code that exists anywhere (e.g., on GitHub).

According to the NPM repository's info page on Sails, the latest NPM-hosted version is 0.9.16 while the current GitHub version is 0.10.0-rc3.