[captn3m0]

Aliases and pre-hooks are nowhere near the guarantees you want, that’s what I am arguing - not everything is invoked from a blessed shell. Safely-bump-does.sh is also impossibly hard to write because you are replicating _all of the work NPM does in transitive dependency resolution_. Unless you are re-generating the lock file from scratch - it isn’t safe. Just updating package.json isn’t sufficient for eg.

[jamesrom]

safely-bump-deps.sh does not need to do impossibly hard things. It can just call npm: outdated, install --save-exact and/or install --package-lock-only. There's plenty of solutions here.

Pushing this into a hook makes it invisible, implicit, hard to debug, and an entry point for all sorts of undefined behaviours.