Carrot vs Tilde#

Out of curiosity, I tried googling what the caret symbol (^) and tilde symbol (~) mean in a package.json file.

It turns out that if a version is specified using the caret symbol, you want to receive both patch and minor updates to the installed package. For example, if I install a package with version 4.1.5, then I can receive updates up to versions >= 4.1.5 and < 5.0.0.

Whereas the tilde symbol behaves differently. With it, you only want patch-level updates.

If neither a tilde nor a caret symbol is used, you’re specifying that you want the exact version.

This Stackoverflow post explains it really well: What’s the difference between tilde(~) and caret(^) in package.json?.

Resolutions#

The resolutions section in package.json is quite handy. Suppose I have two dependencies that rely on different versions of the same package - For example, Package A and Package B both depend on different versions of lodash.

To avoid version conflicts, I can use the resolutions field to enforce a specific version of lodash across my entire project. This ensures that, regardless of what version each dependency requests, the one I specify in the resolutions section will be used.

See Selective dependency resolutions for more details.

Also, an important thing to note is that resolutions is a Yarn-specific feature. If you’re using npm, the equivalent is called overrides. See npm equivalent of yarn resolutions? and 0036-overrides.md.