tiny-updater

Tiny Updater

A small update notifier for NPM packages, useful for CLI apps.

Pros & Cons

This is basically a bare-bones alternative to update-notifier, with all the pros and cons of that.

• Small: This library hsa only a handful of small and reliable dependencies. Once fetch will be enabled by default in Node this library should weigh around ~3kb, currently it has a dependency on undici though, which needs around ~150kb of code.
• Bundler-ready: This library can be bundled, which is important for achieving the best startup times. update-notifier on the other hand uses highly dyanmic imports and spawns a child process, if you are using it you can't bundle your CLI app.
• Fast: Startup performance is paramount for CLI apps, in order to improve that you need to bundle your app and make the bundle as small as possible, using this library won't compromise your startup times much.
• Bare-bones: Being lightweight comes at a cost, that cost is mainly less visually-sophisticated update messages written to the console compared to update-notifier, but still I think the output is pretty good.
• Work in progress: While this library should suit most use cases it's currently less flexible than update-notifier, if you need something fancy this may not work for you.

Install

npm install --save tiny-updater

Usage

import updater from 'tiny-updater';
import {name, version} from './package.json';

await updater ({ name, version });

// If there are no updates available:
// 1. `false` is returned
// 2. Nothing is logged to the console

// If there is an update available:
// 1. `true` is returned
// 2. Right before the process exists a message like the following is logged to the console:
// 📦 Update available for example-package: 0.1.0 → 1.0.0

License

MIT © Fabio Spampinato