Inspect Composer and NPM Dependency Changes With Whatsdiff

Whatsdiff is a CLI tool that shows what has changed in your project's dependencies after a composer update or an npm update. After installing whatsdiff globally, you can run various commands, including a TUI mode that quickly visualizes diffs in an organized way.

# Output diffs in the terminal
$ whatsdiff
 
# JSON output
$ whatsdiff --format=json
 
# Markdown output
$ whatsdiff --format=markdown
 
# TUI mode
$ whatsdiff tui
 
# Compare between two tags
whatsdiff between v1.0.0 v2.0.0
 
# From commmit to HEAD
whatsdiff between abc123

You can see both Composer and NPM package version updates together if you have an updated package lockfile, but I tend to work through them separately:

Another neat feature is getting the changelog between versions, which you can use to quickly scan what's changed without browsing through multiple releases:

whatsdiff changelog laravel/framework 12.0.0...12.36.0

#Main Features

• Analyse changes in composer.lock and package-lock.json between commits
• Read changelog and release notes of updated packages
• Interactive Terminal UI
• Multiple output formats (text, JSON, markdown)
• MCP server to help LLM understand how to upgrade your project dependencies
• CI/CD integration to check if specific packages have changed

You can get started by visiting the whatsdiff.app documentation.