Display the last modified date of every package on package.json dependencies list using npm-view (https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v7/commands/npm-view)

show_last_modified_dates.sh

#!/bin/bash
## (c) 2022 Micael Levi L. C.
## This script requires:
## - npm (https://nodejs.org)
## - jq (https://stedolan.github.io/jq)

file="${1:-./package.json}"

 [ -r "$file" ] || { echo "The file $file is not readable" ; exit 1 ; }

readarray -t pkgs < <(jq --raw-output '.dependencies | keys | .[]' "$file")

readarray -t modified_vals < <(printf 'npm view "%s" time.modified\n' ${pkgs[@]} | bash)

paste <(printf "%s\n" "${modified_vals[@]}") <(printf "%s\n" "${pkgs[@]}") | sort

Hey Micael, thanks for this script, it works perfectly!

I was trying to figure out though what time.modified even means.

Looking at e.g. https://github.com/shelljs/shx/commits/main I see that the last commit was on Aug 10 as of writing this. Running npm view shx --json shows me time.modified as 2022-06-26T19:13:27.666Z

So if it is not the latest commit on the main branch then what is it?
I would also argue that latest commit is a better indicator, since that seems to be newer than the time.modified, at least in this case.

@mcmxcdev thanks! good question

here you can see how NPM computes that value: https://github.com/npm/cli/blob/34db56263c0d25caf5fff46e97f391e9ff094243/lib/commands/view.js#L350-L351

tbh I didn't fully understand it lol Keep in mind that a NPM package doesn't need to have a Git repo, so I believe that they don't try to look up for the last commit made