sindresorhus/update-notifier

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1808 stars · 161 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

A Node.js library that lets CLI applications non-intrusively notify users when a newer version of the package is available. It asynchronously checks npm in a background child process and caches results to avoid impacting startup performance.

Use cases

• notify CLI users when a new version is available
• check npm registry for package updates in the background
• show non-intrusive update prompts in a command-line tool
• customize update check interval and notification message
• detect update type (major, minor, patch) for a package

When to choose

• you maintain an npm-distributed CLI app and want users to know about updates
• you need a lightweight, zero-impact update check that runs asynchronously
• you want configurable check intervals and custom notification messages

When to avoid

• your software is not distributed via npm
• you need forced auto-updates rather than passive notifications
• you are building a GUI or web application rather than a CLI tool

Facets

library · maturity stable

developer-tools cli alerting developer-tools backend cross-platform update-notifier npm version-checking cli-ux command-line nodejs

Member repositories

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="sindresorhus/update-notifier")