A few days ago, surfing on the web, i saw a site of a service that called my attention and made me think “that’s a great idea”.

The idea was… “don’t worry about update your npm’s dependencies, we do..”.

The service that i’m talking about is greenkeeper.

This service, periodically, will analyze the package.json of a GitHub repo, check for dependencies’s updates and make a Pull Request with the changes. It’s simple but powerful. If you have a good set of hooks for validation, like a travis/jenkings builder, you can check if the new version of the dependencies breaks your code.

Greenkeeper provide three plans, one is free!!

• Open Source (FREE):
• Unlimited public repos
• Public queue (might take a while to update)
• Individual ($14/month):
• Unlimited privates repos
• Faster queue
• Online support
• Organisations ($50-$90/month):
• 20-50 privates repos
• Fastest queue
• Online support

About the plan, using the free one for now, the response time of the queue is really good. In a few (2-4) minutes i had the pull request in my repo, so for now the time is not a problem. Perhaps when the service has more demand this time increases, i hope not!

Now the implementation, there is no need of extra instructions. The Getting started of the official site is more than necessary. You only need to install a global NPM package, authorize greenkeeper on GitHub and then have fun.

There is only one thing about this service that not convince me at a 100%, when the service updates the package.json versions, removes all the semver symbols and puts the raw version. This is not totally wrong, because the service will update when detects a new version. But is a little detail that does not convince me completely.

In short, it is a very good alternative for those who forgets about the updates and ends with old and obsolete projects.