Better Dependencies Management for a Team

When you are like me working in a team of web engineers, on a project which involves usage of external 3rd party libraries and you are using npm and/or bower to manage those dependencies, you probably will find it useful.

The problem:

When you are working in a team and you are not keeping the 3rd party dependencies as part of your repository. Someone decides to add/remove/upgrade some dependency, they modify package.json or bower.json files reflecting the change and submits the change into repository.

Now you pull those changes into your local copy of the project and unless you run manually npm install and bower install you won’t have those dependencies updated for you locally. Which in most cases result to build/run errors or inconsistency.

The solution:

As we are working with grunt, I wrote a small grunt task which helps detect and update dependencies if package.json or bower.json files version was changed.

So from now on, when someone changes a dependency and bumps npm/bower version, grunt task will automatically update every team member local dependencies.

Which eliminates notifications, questions and increases productivity. :)

Feel free to use it: 
https://www.npmjs.com/package/grunt-local-deps-update