Dependency Deprecation Warnings

Renovate now supports raising issues to warn a repository if it is using any deprecated npm packages. This feature can help prevent you being “in the dark” that a dependency you are using may never get updates again.

A common cause of this is simply that a package has been renamed (e.g. from coffee-script to coffeescript) however users are often not aware of this. If users are not aware, they remain on the old package name and without the benefits of new features and bug fixes in the new one.

Now, Renovate will by default raise a warning issue whenever it detects that the version tagged as latest on the npm registry has its deprecated field set. Usually this is a message suggesting alternative packages to use.

It is important that you resolve this problem (e.g. by renaming or removing the package) before closing this issue, because otherwise Renovate will raise a replacement issue the next time it runs. If you wish to ignore a particular dependency’s deprecation then you can add it to your ignorDeps array in config. e.g.

{
  "ignoreDeps": ["coffee-script"]
}

If you wish to disable deprecation warnings completely, then set raiseDeprecationWarnings to false instead.

Thanks go to Hutson Betts for suggesting the feature.

Rhys Arkins / About Author

Rhys Arkins is Vice President of Product Management, responsible for developer solutions at Mend.io. He was the founder of Renovate Bot – an automated tool for software dependency updating, which was acquired by Mend.io in 2019. Rhys is particularly fond of automation and a firm believer in never sending humans to do a machine’s job.