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.
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will automatically track your project's dependencies and automatically submit pull requests to update anything that is outdated!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!
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!