The versions listed as betas were tagged differently. does not pull the most recent version published to npm In the case of this package, that's release 1.0.1. Installing simply looks up the release tagged as latest in the registry.

Latest is an implicit tag, attached to any published version of a package that was not published with an explicit tag ( -tag). This is made pretty clear by reading the manual. $ npm install webpack/extract-text-webpack-plugin If you want the beta releases, then install from GitHub, or use the tags explicitly. Typically, projects only use the latest tag for stable release versions, and use other tags for unstable versions such as prereleases.īy default, other than latest, no tag has any special significance to npm itself.

Tags can be used to provide an alias instead of version numbers.įor example, a project might choose to have multiple streams of development and use a different tag for each stream, e.g., stable, beta, dev, canary.īy default, the latest tag is used by npm to identify the current version of a package, and npm install (without any or specifier) installs the latest tag. Version 1.0.1 is the 'latest' version of that package - published to the npm registry at least ( tagged as latest)įrom the docs for cli/dist-tag.

Npm latest version