Updating Dependencies

Avoiding duplicate versions of dependencies is a necessary evil in front-end applications. When using the package-lock.json file, dependencies versions are locked on each of your dependencies. If you update one dependency, but not another, it is possible for you to encounter version conflicts.

We recommend one of two solutions for this.

Encountering conflicts

As part of your normal development flow you might update dependencies when you see there is a new version via npm outdated. We recommend always creating a new branch to do updates:

git checkout -b updates

npm update can

Which will update to the latest version of can. Then continue with your normal development:

donejs develop

If you encounter errors or bugs (often you will get a you cannot have multiple versions of... error). then you can fix these by doing:

rm -rf node_modules package-lock.json
npm install

Deleting the package-lock.json file forces a new version to be generated. This new version will have dependencies ordered correctly. Then retest and most likely the problem will be resolved.

If you encounter an error you cannot resolve then rollback the change by removing the branch:

git checkout master
git branch -D updates

A future release of can will likely fix this problem.

Turning off package-lock

Another option is to remove the package-lock.json file. This prevents you from having locked dependencies but also ensures that you always have the latest version of every package.

You can disable package-lock in your repo by adding a .npmrc file in your root project folder with the following:

package-lock=false

If you have an existing package-lock.json file you'll need to remove it (including from git) and then reinstall:

rm -rf node_modules package-lock.json
npm install