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@othiym23
Created September 20, 2014 19:36
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a safe way to upgrade all of your globally-installed npm packages
#!/bin/sh
set -e
set -x
for package in $(npm -g outdated --parseable --depth=0 | cut -d: -f3)
do
npm -g install "$package"
done
#!/bin/sh
set -e
set -x
for package in $(npm -g outdated --parseable --depth=0 | cut -d: -f2)
do
npm -g install "$package"
done
@callemo
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callemo commented Apr 21, 2017

This one-liner made the trick for me: npm -gp outdated | cut -d: -f4 | xargs -n1 npm -g install

@Noyabronok
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the one liner updated npm for me :(

@hrushikesh09
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+1 @dylan
npm -g i npm-check

@calpa
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calpa commented Aug 6, 2017

+1 @dylang npm-check

@jan-hudec
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jan-hudec commented Aug 14, 2017

npm outdated -g seems to have stopped working too. Does not print anything at all here though there definitely are outdated packages.

@Jeff-Lewis
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npm outdated -g was fixed a while back and works with npm version 6.4.1.

@akaleeroy
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Running npm v6.8.0 and seeing this problem again. Global packages won't update beyond "wanted".

> npm outdated --global
Package        Current  Wanted  Latest  Location
color-convert    1.9.3   1.9.3   2.0.0
mocha            5.2.0   5.2.0   6.0.0
pdfkit           0.8.3   0.8.3   0.9.0

> npm update --global pdfkit
# does nothing

> npm update --global pdfkit@latest
# does nothing

> npm install --global pdfkit
+ pdfkit@0.9.0
added 8 packages from 41 contributors and updated 22 packages in 9.638s

@KlausEverWalkingDev
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If you prefer to choose which global modules are updated I've added interactive updating to npm-check with support for global.

It also includes links to the source for each updated package so you can find out what's new.

Behind the scenes npm-check uses npm install thanks to the recommendation from @othiym23 in this thread.

# install
npm -g i npm-check

# interactive update of global packages
npm-check -u -g

# interactive update for a project you are working on
npm-check -u

Example using npm-check -u:
screen shot 2014-10-20 at 10 39 29 am

Source: github.com/dylang/npm-check

Great, bro! Thanks! :D

@martin-braun
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The Wanted version shall be another major version, which is not very favorable, since it can break things.

Here is a way to upgrade only minor versions of global packages:

npm_global_packages=($(npm list -g --depth 0 | awk '/ /{print $2}'))
for val in "${npm_global_packages[@]}"; do
    npm i -g --force $(echo $val | tr "." "\n" | head -1)
done

more context

Good part is, that it will not bump npm to a version that is incompatible with the current node version, so this will most likely not break.

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