Display the last modified date of every package on package.json dependencies list using npm-view (https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v7/commands/npm-view)

show_last_modified_dates.sh

#!/bin/bash
## (c) 2022 Micael Levi L. C.
## This script requires:
## - npm (https://nodejs.org)
## - jq (https://stedolan.github.io/jq)

file="${1:-./package.json}"

 [ -r "$file" ] || { echo "The file $file is not readable" ; exit 1 ; }

readarray -t pkgs < <(jq --raw-output '.dependencies | keys | .[]' "$file")

readarray -t modified_vals < <(printf 'npm view "%s" time.modified\n' ${pkgs[@]} | bash)

paste <(printf "%s\n" "${modified_vals[@]}") <(printf "%s\n" "${pkgs[@]}") | sort

$ ./show_last_modified_dates.sh 
2017-10-26T21:00:34.418Z	tv4
2019-01-15T20:29:21.950Z	reflect-metadata
2019-01-30T20:23:34.438Z	toml
2019-05-29T15:17:01.038Z	node-machine-id
2020-04-18T08:20:27.180Z	typeorm-seeding
2020-05-18T00:29:29.526Z	mysql-error-codes
2020-06-06T15:15:54.760Z	ssh-keygen
2021-03-30T17:02:51.646Z	@joi/date
2021-08-03T08:47:42.246Z	@nestjs/typeorm
2021-09-12T18:47:35.923Z	dockerode
2021-11-18T09:19:58.256Z	@nestjs/swagger
2021-11-29T17:04:37.699Z	glob
2021-12-01T20:14:49.984Z	simple-git
2021-12-07T20:23:03.752Z	tar
2021-12-09T09:51:16.440Z	ejs
2021-12-16T09:24:24.380Z	swagger-ui-express
2021-12-18T17:02:49.944Z	axios
2021-12-18T17:03:00.283Z	joi
2021-12-20T18:03:24.661Z	pino-http
2021-12-28T18:46:17.263Z	mysql
2022-01-01T21:33:56.063Z	nestjs-form-data
2022-01-03T09:30:14.595Z	@nestjs/config
2022-01-06T17:27:50.410Z	@vrbo/pino-rotating-file
2022-01-09T06:16:51.367Z	dayjs
2022-01-10T02:45:50.624Z	rimraf
2022-01-10T05:04:38.568Z	ssh2
2022-01-10T17:20:11.324Z	pino
2022-01-11T15:47:08.258Z	@automapper/nestjs
2022-01-11T15:47:10.763Z	@automapper/classes
2022-01-11T15:47:12.557Z	@automapper/core
2022-01-12T10:10:34.224Z	@nestjs/core
2022-01-12T10:10:35.525Z	@nestjs/platform-express
2022-01-12T10:10:35.628Z	@nestjs/common
2022-01-13T08:02:15.725Z	ms
2022-01-13T21:46:44.513Z	rxjs
2022-01-15T15:18:17.850Z	typeorm
2022-01-17T02:09:41.056Z	nestjs-pino

now you can see which packages seems to be unmaintained.

Hey Micael, thanks for this script, it works perfectly!

I was trying to figure out though what time.modified even means.

Looking at e.g. https://github.com/shelljs/shx/commits/main I see that the last commit was on Aug 10 as of writing this. Running npm view shx --json shows me time.modified as 2022-06-26T19:13:27.666Z

So if it is not the latest commit on the main branch then what is it?
I would also argue that latest commit is a better indicator, since that seems to be newer than the time.modified, at least in this case.

@mcmxcdev thanks! good question

here you can see how NPM computes that value: https://github.com/npm/cli/blob/34db56263c0d25caf5fff46e97f391e9ff094243/lib/commands/view.js#L350-L351

tbh I didn't fully understand it lol Keep in mind that a NPM package doesn't need to have a Git repo, so I believe that they don't try to look up for the last commit made