How do I override nested NPM dependency versions?

Question

How do I override nested NPM dependency versions?

I would like to use the grunt-contrib-jasmine NPM package. It has various dependencies. Part of the dependancy graph looks like this:

─┬ grunt-contrib-jasmine@0.4.1
 │ ├─┬ grunt-lib-phantomjs@0.2.0
 │ │ ├─┬ phantomjs@1.8.2-2

Unfortunately, there's a bug in this version phantomjs which prevents it from installing correctly on Mac OS X. This is fixed in the latest version.

How can I get grunt-lib-phantomjs to use a newer version of phantomjs?

Some additional context:

grunt-contrib-jasmine explicitly requires version "~0.2.0" of grunt-lib-phantomjs, which explicitly requires version "~1.8.1" of phantomjs.
Adding phantomjs to my package's dependencies first has no effect; both versions are installed and grunt-contrib-jasmine still uses the older versions (see: When installing a package with NPM, can you tell it to use a different version of one of its dependencies?).

node.js
npm

Answer 1

You've probably found a workaround for this already.

Anyway, you can use npm shrinkwrap functionality, in order to override any dependency or sub-dependency.

I've just done this in a grunt project of ours. We needed a newer version of connect, since 2.7.3. was causing trouble for us. So I created a file named npm-shrinkwrap.json :

{
  "name": "client-app",
  "version": "0.0.0",
  "dependencies": {
    "grunt-contrib-connect": {
      "version": "0.3.0",
      "from": "grunt-contrib-connect@0.3.0",
      "dependencies": {
        "connect": {
          "version": "2.8.1",
          "from": "connect@~2.7.3"
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

npm should automatically pick it up while doing the install for the project.

(See: http://blog.nodejs.org/2012/02/27/managing-node-js-dependencies-with-shrinkwrap/)