Getting started

This tool scans your project's dependencies, checks for updates on the NPM registry and presents them in a sortable, color-coded table.

In interactive mode, select exactly which packages to upgrade and whether to use the Wanted or Latest version. The tool then updates your package.json files in place while preserving your existing semver ranges and optionally runs npm install to apply the changes.

npm install -g @badisi/check-updates

Features

✅ Interactive table UI — browse, search and toggle package upgrades - grouped by update severity ✅ Wanted vs Latest — upgrade to either: the highest version satisfying your semver range or the absolute latest ✅ Color-coded diffs — instantly see what changed: red for major, cyan for minor, green for patch ✅ Diagnosis — understand what's missing, unsynced, invalid, unsatisfied, unavailable or at the latest version ✅ Smart range preservation — caret (^), tilde (~), exact, wildcard, hyphen and OR ranges are all preserved when writing upgrades ✅ Monorepo-aware — scan multiple package.json files in a single run using glob patterns ✅ Global support — check and upgrade global NPM packages ✅ Caching — reduce registry requests and speed up subsequent runs ✅ Post-upgrade install — optionally run npm install automatically after applying changes

Note: Global package checking and the post-upgrade install step currently support only npm. Pull requests to add support for other package managers are very welcome.

Usage

check-updates [path...] [options]

# or using the shorthand alias:
bcu [path...] [options]

# or without installation, using `npx` directly:
npx @badisi/check-updates [path...] [options]

Options

| Option | Description | | :--- | :--- | | -i, --interactive | Run in interactive mode with a table UI to choose updates and optionally run npm install. | | -g, --global | Check globally installed packages instead of local package.json files. | | -c, --cache | Enable caching to reduce network requests. | | --all | Show up-to-date packages alongside outdated ones. | | -v, --version | Print the tool version. | | -h, --help | Show help information. |

Examples

• Check global packages

Visualize and select upgrades for globally installed packages:

check-updates -g

• Interactive Mode (Recommended)

Interactively choose which updates to apply to your package.json files:

check-updates -i

• Check specific directories, files or glob patterns

By default, the tool looks for package.json in the current directory, but you can specify any number of targets:

# Check a folder
check-updates path/to/folder

# Check a specific file
check-updates path/to/package.json

# Check multiple files or glob patterns
check-updates ./package.json ./packages/core/package.json
check-updates "./**/package.json" "{,projects/**/}package.json"

• Include up-to-date packages

By default, up-to-date dependencies are hidden. To show everything run:

check-updates --all

• Enable cache

Speed up repeated runs by caching registry responses:

check-updates -c

Development

See the developer docs.

Contributing

> Want to Help ?

Want to file a bug, contribute some code or improve documentation ? Excellent!

But please read up first on the guidelines for contributing, and learn about submission process, coding rules and more.

> Code of Conduct

Please read and follow the Code of Conduct and help us keep this project open and inclusive.