Update package to a major release with NPM

Question

Inside a Node.js project, it's not clear to me what is the correct workflow to ugpgrade a package to a major release.

Let's suppose I'm istalling stylelint: npm install --save stylelint by default puts inside my package.json the string "stylelint": "^8.4.1" which means that if I want to update it with npm update, I will get only minor and patch releases (8.4.2 is ok, 8.5.0 in ok, 9.0.0 is not).

If I check with npm outdated and it comes out that I could update to 9.0.0, npm update wouldn't work because of the restriction depicted above.

So, if I want to upgrade, what am I supposed to do?

Have I to manually modify my package.json to stylelint version ^9.0.0, delete node_modules directory and re-run npm install?

Or maybe I have just to remove the ^ character to let npm update do its job?

What is the common/best practice to adopt?

Thanks

Answer 1

So, if I want to upgrade, what am I supposed to do?

In order to update major releases you can use the npm-check-updates.

See this great answer.