npm install using pre-release versions

Question

i want to use pre-release versions in my package.json to get some dependencies in the latest version (containing als pre-releases) but for some reasons it doesn't work in my case. The pre-releases are fully ignored. As an example lets use angular. If I ask "angular": ">=1.4.0-rc.0 <1.4.1" as an dependency, i would expect that i would get the version 1.4.0-rc.2 installed, but i get just the version 1.4.0.

The npm info angular shows, that there are some rc versions available like

...
'1.4.0-beta.4',
'1.4.0-beta.5',
'1.4.0-beta.6',
'1.4.0-rc.0',
'1.4.0-rc.1',
'1.4.0-rc.2',

My package.json looks as follows right now

"dependencies": {
   "angular": ">=1.4.0-rc.0 <1.4.1"
}

Any ideas why i dont get any rc versions? What do i have to do to get it working?

Answer 1

This seems logical, the order of versions is normally the following (for angular releases 1.4.x):

1. 1.4.0-beta.0
2. 1.4.0-beta.2
3. 1.4.0-beta.3
4. 1.4.0-beta.4
5. 1.4.0-beta.5
6. 1.4.0-beta.6
7. 1.4.0-rc.0
8. 1.4.0-rc.1
9. 1.4.0-rc.2
10. 1.4.0
11. 1.4.1

If you request "angular": ">=1.4.0-rc.0 <1.4.1", The latest version that is less strictly 1.4.1 is 1.4.0

Anyway, if you demand "angular": ">=1.4.0-rc.0 <1.4.0", the latest version will be 1.4.0-rc.2