NPM Update - Forcing Package Upgrades (Ignoring SemVer)

Question

Is there a reasonable way to force an update on a node package?

It's great that we are protected from aggressive package development, but it seems like most package versions get saved as exact (i.e. the invisible =, rather than with an inequality or ^ or ~) version numbers, so upgrading even to a patch version seems laborious.

I'm actually not getting npm update to work for me at all.

For example, I have, in my package.json, a package (let's say dependencypackage) listed as such: "dependencypackage":"^0.5.1", and the latest version of dependencypackage on www.npmjs.com is 0.7.1.

Unless I'm mistaken, according to the doc for update, I should be able to run npm update --save dependencypackage to update the package both in the ./node_modules directory, and in the package.json listing.

Unfortunately, this is not working for me. I get no information or output from the command.

Additional info:

• node version: 6.11.2
• npm version: 5.3.0

Example of an unreasonable solution:

• remove and reinstall each package by hand

Answer 1

In order to accomplish that I use npm-check

npm i -g npm-check
npm-check -u

And, if you have outdated dependencies, you'll get something like this

You can then sell the ones you want to upgrade and hit enter. It works like a charm.