NPM

I have moved most of my open source projects to Renovate, and found I simultaneously spend less time focusing on dependency updates and have more current dependencies. Over the past few months I have been moving most of my projects to Renovate for managing dependencies. From my experience, Renovate offers several key benefits over other solutions such as Greenkeeper and Dependabot. This blog post will focus on what Renovate is and what differentiates it from other dependency management solutions. For a higher level overview on dependency management, I recommend checking out how to manage dependencies with confidence. ...

Managing dependencies is a core part of maintaining a project long term. Projects run the risk of decay if not maintained. The evolution of the environment around them can also introduce decay. Dependency management can be an intimidating and error prone process, if not approached with a plan. About a year ago, I went to update the dependencies for a full stack JavaScript application for the first time in over four months. Not knowing any better at the time, I ran npm update and updated all the server and client dependencies in one fell swoop. Looking back I shudder even thinking of that and what happened next. It took two to three hours to get beyond the red React error screen. It was another hour or two until I felt comfortable that everything was operational. ...