Keeping your npm packages up-to-date is crucial for maintaining the security and performance of your projects. In this guide, I'll walk you through the steps to identify and update outdated npm packages.

Thenpm outdated command checks the registry for outdated installed packages. It shows direct dependencies by default, but with the--all flag, it includes all outdated meta-dependencies. Key output fields includewanted (maximum version satisfying semver inpackage.json),latest (latest version in the registry),location, anddepended by. Red indicates a newer version matches semver requirements, and yellow indicates a newer version above semver requirements. Various flags like--json,--long, and--global modify the output format and scope.

For more details, visitnpm outdated documentation.

Note that by defaultnpm update will not update thesemver values of direct dependencies in your project package.json. If you want to also update values inpackage.json you can run:npm update --save (or add thesave=true option to aconfiguration file to make that the default behavior).

For more details, visitnpm update documentation