HACKER Q&A
📣 100011_100001

How do you Track new Versions of Dependencies?


I have been thinking a lot about pro-active dependency management. I would like to have a tool or a way to gather latest release versions of various tools and then ideally get alerted if a new version gets released.

For example Gradle is at 7.3.1, if 7.3.2 becomes available I would like to know about it. Doing it for a single tool is simple, but having to track latest Git version, NPM, Gradle and all the other tools I work with doesn't scale very well.

Is there an existing solution to this problem?


  👤 Jugurtha Accepted Answer ✓
Append `/releases.atom` to any GitHub repository, and you'll get an RSS feed.

Example: https://github.com/gradle/gradle/releases.atom

You can add that to your email client, such as Thunderbird. You get the releases and the release notes. I use that for our dependencies and I read the release notes. I also pull the repos and read many commit logs and diffs to predict the direction of these dependencies: if I see a lot of "movement" and "activity" in a category, I can fairly accurately predict that there will be more and I can shape our engineering effort that way.

Example in Thunderbird on Ubuntu:

- Click on the menu

- Click New

- Click "Feed account"

- Enter a name "My project's dependencies"

- Click "Next"

- Click "Finish"

You will have one "My project's dependencies" element appear on the left sidebar in Thunderbird. Click on that, then:

- Click "Manage feed subscriptions", from the right pane.

- Enter: https://github.com/gradle/gradle/releases.atom in the "Feed URL" field on the window that appears

- Click "Add"

- Click "Close".

You will see "Release notes from gradle" appear on the left sidebar, as a child element of "My project's dependencies" 'feed account'.