a safe way to upgrade all of your globally-installed npm packages

npm-upgrade-bleeding.sh

#!/bin/sh

set -e
set -x

for package in $(npm -g outdated --parseable --depth=0 | cut -d: -f3)
do
    npm -g install "$package"
done

npm-upgrade.sh

#!/bin/sh

set -e
set -x

for package in $(npm -g outdated --parseable --depth=0 | cut -d: -f2)
do
    npm -g install "$package"
done

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 npm outdated --global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

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:

Source: github.com/dylang/npm-check

Great, bro! Thanks! :D

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.