LTS Pin

LTS Pin is a CLI tool that automatically pins your project dependencies to the previous major or minor stable versions, helping you maintain long-term support and avoid unexpected breaking changes.

Features

• Detects your package manager (bun, pnpm, yarn, or npm)
• Pins all dependencies, devDependencies, and peerDependencies in your package.json to the previous major or minor version (using ~ for minor/patch updates)
• Regenerates your lockfile using your detected package manager

Installation & Usage

You can run LTS Pin directly without installing globally using tools like bunx, npx, or similar:

bunx lts-pin

npx lts-pin

Or specify a target directory:

bunx lts-pin ./path/to/project
# or
npx lts-pin ./path/to/project

You can also install globally:

npm install -g lts-pin
lts-pin

How it works

1. Reads your package.json and collects all dependencies.
2. For each dependency, fetches metadata from the npm registry and determines the previous major or minor stable version.
3. Updates your package.json to pin each dependency to ~<previous version>.
4. Detects your package manager and runs the appropriate install command to update your lockfile.

API

You can also use the main functions programmatically:

• updateToPreviousVersions: Updates dependencies in a target directory.
• getPreviousVersion: Gets the previous major or minor version for a package.
• detectPackageManager: Detects the package manager in a directory.

Why?

I've had too many issues with newer major releases. An example that annoys me often is eslint's upgrade to Version 9 where they introduced new config layouts. None of the underlying plugins for ESlint were compatible for like 6 months, so I always had to downgrade.

I personally don't think that a new major version for a software is anywhere viable until it hits x.1.1, e.g. 5.1.1 for typescript. The only time you shouldn't run this is when the latest version of the prior major release has a vulnerability.

License

MIT

Author: Ashley Jackson