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Show HN: Dependency Time Machine – Update Helper for Legacy JavaScript Projects (github.com/pilotpirxie)
3 points by __natty__ on Sept 29, 2023 | hide | past | favorite
tl;dr dependency-time-machine is a tiny helper to update package.json dependencies one by one in chronological order with an optional auto-runner.

Hey all, this is my first Show HN so glad to meet you :)

In recent months in my work, I've been responsible for updating the dependencies of many years-old project.

With dozens of dependencies, it was painful to do it by hand and think in which order should I update. Even more, some dependencies were not using semversion, had phantom dependencies, certain versions were broken, were cross-incompatible or didn't have changelogs.

So I wrote this simple tool to check versions for every package listed in package.json directly from the npm registry and sort them chronologically in groups based on dependency name. Thanks to this I was able to update like it was done regularly because packages always depend on other packages from past time. In the traditional way and not from the future like it eventually can be done in the traditional way.

I'm sharing this because maybe you will find it useful. You can check the next suggested dependency to update, generate a timeline in JSON or try autorunner. It's open-sourced, has only one direct dependency for shell interactions and runs on your hardware.




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