Find the version of an installed npm package

Naveera A.

—October 21, 2022

The ProblemThe Problem

Most modern JavaScript apps use a bunch of third party packages. Many packages are installed globally too.

How do you find the installed versions of the various npm packages?

The SolutionThe Solution

All locally installed npm packages are listed in the package-lock.json file. For a smaller project, you can take a quick look at this file.

An easier way to find the installed versions of npm packages that doesn’t require so much visual scanning is to use the built-in command list:

$ npm list

This command will print all the versions of packages that are installed in the current directory to stdout, like so:

$ npm list
projectName@projectVersion /path/to/project/folder
├── futil@1.69.0
└── lodash@4.17.21

If you want to see all the dependencies of manually installed packages and their versions, you can use --all :

$ npm list --all
projectName@projectVersion /path/to/project/folder
├─┬ futil@1.69.0
│ ├─┬ babel-polyfill@6.26.0
│ │ ├─┬ babel-runtime@6.26.0
│ │ │ ├── core-js@2.6.12 deduped
│ │ │ └── regenerator-runtime@0.11.1
│ │ ├── core-js@2.6.12
│ │ └── regenerator-runtime@0.10.5
│ └── lodash@4.17.21 deduped
└── lodash@4.17.21

You can also control the depth of level to show by using --depth. For example, using --depth=1 will show the following:

$ npm list --depth=1
projectName@projectVersion /path/to/project/folder
├─┬ futil@1.69.0
│ ├── babel-polyfill@6.26.0
│ └── lodash@4.17.21 deduped
└── lodash@4.17.21

Notice that any dependencies that are more than two levels deep are removed from the tree.

If you want to take a look at globally installed packages, you can use -g, like so:

$ npm list -g
/path/to/node/v16.15.1/lib
├── corepack@0.10.0
└── npm@8.12.1

To find the version of a specific package, specify its name:

$ npm list futil
projectName@projectVersion /path/to/project/folder
└── futil@1.69.0

To check the latest available version of the package on the npm repository, use the view option:

$ npm view futil --version
8.12.1

Besides these, there are a few other options that can be used with list. You can take a look at all available options in the official documentation.