Some Must have VS Code Extensions #3 - Version Lens

I have been writing this series about some must-have VS Code extensions for the developers who consistently use Visual Studio Code for their development activities. I just realized that it's been a while since I wrote an article in this series. Today while surfing the internet for one of the problems that I face regularly, I came across this VS Code extension called Version Lens. Usually, when we are working on a project in VS Code, we install the npm packages and rarely update the existing packages as long as there are no breaking changes or dire need to update the packages in our project.

Today I was starting a new project and wanted to copy the package.json file from another project. While checking the package.json file, I noticed that some of the npm packages were outdated. That is when I surfed the internet to find a solution to update the packages. The references and suggestions that I got about updating the packages did not work for me. Then I found this Version Lens.

About Version Lens

After reading about this in Version Lens extension in one of the Stack Overflow answers, I really felt that this is what I really wanted to have. Version Lens is a VS Code extension that can be installed on our IDE. After installing this extension globally on our VS Code editor, if we navigate to the package.json file in our project, we will be able to see the version details of packages that we have already included in the project. The below screenshot shows how it will be displayed.

We can then click on the lastest to update the package.json file with the latest package version. I was really impressed by this extension because for every developer this becomes a painful activity to manually go and update all the packages to the latest version and without even know if that will break our project or not. It is also a difficult activity to go and check if there are updates to our NPM packages or not. This extension helps in displaying the updates that are available for the NPM packages and let us choose which one we would like to update.

We can even update packages one by one to check for breaking changes and make sure our project is intact after the update and go ahead with updating the next package. The extension currently supports the following package managers:

In VS Code we can see a 5-star rating for the project. I believe that says how popular this extension is and how useful it is for the users. This is also an open-source extension and developers can contribute to the project to make it even better.

GIT Repository: https://github.com/vscode-contrib/vscode-versionlens

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