The npm ecosystem with its 360,000+ modules is a great foundation to build your software on.
Using this many modules quickly leads to a constantly changing platform and no way of knowing what changes and when.
Until you use Greenkeeper: we track your dependencies and trigger your test suite with every new version coming in. If a dependency version you’re relying on breaks your software, we open an Issue. Find the source of the problem in the attached release notes and commits, or downgrade quickly. For major upgrades we will send you a Pull Request directly.
You could manually track updates of your dependencies and test whether things continue to work. This takes a lot of time however and it’s rarely ever done. So most of the time, your software is in a Schrödinger state of being potentially broken, and you have no idea until you run npm install and try the next time.
Greenkeeper takes away these chores of dependency management. npm install and npm test is called immediately after an update. There is no doubt about the state of your software.
Greenkeeper is currently free for all repositories on GitHub. It will always stay that way for Open Source Projects. Once GitHub Integrations are out of beta there will be a monthly charge for private repos. Greenkeeper works with npm, GitHub and any CI service. If you want to run Greenkeeper on your own hardware, behind your firewall, we support that too!
In general, people really seem to like Greenkeeper.
Greenkeeper sits between npm and GitHub, observing all of the modules you depend on. When they get updated, your project gets a new branch with that update. Your CI tests kick in, and we watch them to see whether they pass.
Based on the test results and your current version definition we will send you Pull Requests or open Issues.
Let the friendly Greenkeeper bot take all the dull work of keeping your dependencies up to date off your shoulders and, optimally, boil it all down to a few clicks. This is as close to fully automatic as we could possibly make it.
You’re using GitHub Enterprise or npm Enterprise? No problem, we support those too.
Please get in touch with us we’ll get you set up in no time.