deputui is a TUI for reviewing release notes of NPM dependencies.

Motivation

Reviewing release notes is tedious: Run pnpm outdated, look up the corresponding repositories, and hunt down all relevant release notes.

However, for dependencies that adhere to semver semantics, we know that …

• major version updates have breaking changes that might take some effort,
• minor version updates have new features we might want to adopt, and
• patch version updates have bug fixes only which we always want to install.

Most of the time, we will be reviewing minor version updates. It'd be great to make that fast and convenient. This is what deputui is for. 🏎️💨

How to use

Pipe your pnpm output directly into deputui:

$ pnpm outdated --format json | deputui

Then, in deputui, review release notes and select those releases you want to install.

When you're done, confirm. The package@version identifiers you selected will be printed to stdout.

If you want to update to the selected releases, you can pipe the output back to pnpm:

$ pnpm outdated --format json | deputui | xargs pnpm update

Configuration

deputui fetches release notes from GitHub's REST API. GitHub limits unauthenticated requests to 60 requests per hour, and authenticated requests to 5,000 requests per hour (https://docs.github.com/en/rest/using-the-rest-api/rate-limits-for-the-rest-api).

deputui makes unauthenticated requests by default. You can make it make authenticated requests by providing your GitHub personal access token via an environment variable:

$ export DEPUTUI_GITHUB_TOKEN=your_github_token_here
$ pnpm outdated --format json | deputui | xargs pnpm update

Installation

Manually

If you're using nix, run

$ nix develop

You will enter a nix shell that has access to all the binaries in this project, including the rust toolchain.

If you're not using nix, reconsider your life decisions, then install rust and

$ make all

This will build and install three binaries:

• deputui
• deputui-pnpm
• deputui-review

Via flake.nix

If you want to use this in a project that has a flake.nix, this is the minimal setup for having the binaries in your dev shell:

{
  inputs = {
    nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-25.11";
    deputui.url = "github:twiddler/deputui";
  };

  outputs = { self, nixpkgs, deputui }:
    let
      system = "x86_64-linux";

      pkgs = import nixpkgs {
        inherit system;
      };
    in {
      devShells.${system}.default = pkgs.mkShell {
        name = "dev-shell";

        buildInputs = with pkgs; [
          deputui.packages.${system}.default
        ];
      };
    };
}

What about npm, yarn, …?

If you're using a package manager other than pnpm, you can still use this! You only need to transform its output to a JSON dictionary that matches this schema:

{
  "foo": { "current": "1.0.0", "wanted": "1.0.1" },
  "bar": { "current": "2.0.0", "wanted": "2.3.2" }
}

You might want to try jq for transforming. After that, you can

$ some-package-manager outdated | jq <your transform> | deputui

Advanced Usage

This project provides both an all-in-one binary and a modular architecture:

• deputui: All-in-one binary that handles parsing, fetching, and review in one command
• deputui-pnpm: Reads pnpm outdated --format json, fetches minor version updates from the NPM registry and outputs releases to review
• deputui-review: The TUI application for reviewing and selecting updates

Save release list for later review

$ pnpm outdated --format json | deputui-pnpm > releases.json
$ cat releases.json | deputui-review

Filter releases with custom tools

$ pnpm outdated --format json | deputui-pnpm | jq 'select(.package | startswith("@types"))' | deputui-review