Expand documentation for `ng update`

[brian428]

I'm trying to do something that should be utterly trivial: update an Angular CLI 6.1.1 app to the latest version of 6.x.

Apparently, I'm supposed to use ng update to do this. But I have absolutely no idea what this command actually does, and the docs don't help at all.

Consider:

>ng update
    We analyzed your package.json, there are some packages to update:

      Name                               Version                  Command to update
     --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      @angular/cli                       6.1.1 -> 6.2.1           ng update @angular/cli
      @angular/core                      6.1.1 -> 6.1.7           ng update @angular/core
      rxjs                               6.2.2 -> 6.3.2           ng update rxjs


    There might be additional packages that are outdated.
    Or run ng update --all to try to update all at the same time.

Hmm...OK, I'm positive that more than cli and core need to be updated. Why aren't the other packages listed? There's a note that "there might be additional packages that are outdated". Might? Can't the CLI see exactly what needs updating?

But OK, let's try it with --all and use --dry-run to try and see what will happen:

>ng update --all --dry-run
                  Package "bootstrap" has a missing peer dependency of "popper.js" @ "^1.14.3".
                  Package "@angular/compiler-cli" has an incompatible peer dependency to "typescript" (requires ">=2.7.2 <2.10", would install "3.0.3")
                  Package "@angular/compiler-cli" has an incompatible peer dependency to "typescript" (requires ">=2.7.2 <2.10", would install "3.0.3").
Incompatible peer dependencies found. See above.

OK, now I'm even more confused. Why is ng update doing anything with bootstrap? And compiler-cli wasn't even listed in the earlier list. Finally, if ng update is going to update compiler-cli, shouldn't it know that typescript (obviously being a dependency of compiler-cli) would be getting updated too?

Basically, I have no idea what's going on or what's going to happen if I run ng update --all. What will be updated? Right now, it sounds like I just have to run it and hope that it knows what it's doing.

I think a lot of confusion could be avoided if the ng update docs were more than one (vague) sentence long. I'd take a shot at updating the docs myself, but I literally have no idea what this command actually does (other than "it updates something"). Could someone take a few minutes and expand the docs on this command? Because I assume that in-version updates like this are far more common than full version updates.

[brianivander]

I have the same problem:
Package "@angular/compiler-cli" has an incompatible peer dependency to "typescript" (requires ">=2.7.2 <2.10", would install "3.0.3")

How to fix this?

[brian428]

It’s worth noting that a year and a half later, every problem I outlined above is still present. I get that no one likes to update documentation, but come on folks. Please have someone spend 15 minutes to write more than one sentence on this essential command?

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