I rely on the amazing nvm library to maintain multiple, side-by-side major versions of Node.js to help me work with many different applications. I also use quite a few global CLI applications written in Node.js. These are typically installed with this command:
1 | npm install --global <package-name> |
To update these globally installed packages, I used to rely on this manual workflow:
- List the globally installed packages using
npm ls --global --depth=0 - Copy paste the names of all the packages from the output of the above command to install them again - like
npm install --global <package-1> <package-2> ... <package-n>
Since I found myself doing this every few days, and that too, for every side-by-side version of Node.js I have on my machine, I decided to spend some time today to convert this into a one-liner command (which I can then add as an alias into my .zshrc file).
Since I also have the awesome jq utility installed on my machine, this is what I have come up with:
1 | npm ls --global --json --depth=0 | jq --raw-output '.dependencies | keys | join(" ")' | xargs npm install --global |