The modular nature of the JavaScript ecosystem is vast and truly incredible.
The community has embraced the Unix philosophy:
Write programs that do one thing and do it well
Having a modular system does, however, come with some drawbacks.
Mainly dependency management.
Instead of maintaining all of your code internally, we leverage the power of the open-source world and pull in a ton of third party (and first-party) modules.
Keeping these modules up to date can be a challenge…
One way to curb the dependency blues is an excellent service call greenkeeper.io.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COKpAj2sRs4
Greenkeeper will automatically track your project’s dependencies and automatically submit pull requests to update anything that is outdated!
The pull requests will be non-breaking if you and your dependencies follow correct semantic versioning rules. Woot!
Install greenkeeper.io
In your terminal install with these commands:
npm install -g greenkeeper
# then login
greenkeeper login
# then enable in the root of your project
greenkeeper enable
I hope this saves you some time and keeps your projects fresh to def.
Happy coding!