Make npm fetch latest package from Git repo

Question

My question is similar to this one.

A project has a dependency on a Git module which resides in a privately-hosted repository:

"dependencies": {
  "mymod": "git+https://mygitserver:8443/scm/od/mymod.git",
  ...
}

The intention is for this to be a snapshot dependency, so whenever any mymod code gets modified, the project pulls down the latest version.

The question is, what command should I properly use to update my project to the latest version of the module?

The only thing that I have found that works is:

rm -rf node_modules/mymod
npm install

Running npm install alone does nothing (given that it has been run once already), as noted by @Vishwanath in his question, because the module is already installed. npm upgrade is inappropriate, because I also have dependencies on a lot of other modules, and I do not want to upgrade them all to newer versions.

I guess I could explicitly version mymod and then update my local package.json with the new version whenever it changes, but that creates an ongoing maintenance task.

It seems like npm has enough information to determine when an upgrade is needed, because node_modules/mymod/package.json contains the last known head revision, which it could compare to the current head revision:

"gitHead": "b63f0df8ef...",
"_resolved": "git+https://mygitserver:8443/scm/od/mymod.git#b63f0df8ef..."

Does npm have a preferred way of handling snapshot dependencies like this?

Answer 1

You can manually update a package.

npm update mymod

This will update your package-lock.json with latest hash commit.