Greenkeeper adds a badge to your README which indicates the status of this repository.

This is what your badge looks like right now 👉

You may have good reasons for not wanting to update to a certain dependency right now. In this case, you can change the dependency’s version string in the package.json file back to whatever you prefer.

To make sure Greenkeeper doesn’t nag you again on the next update, add a greenkeeper.ignore field to your package.json, containing a list of dependencies you don’t want to update.

// package.json
{
  …
  "greenkeeper": {
    "ignore": [
      "package-names",
      "you-want-me-to-ignore"
    ]
  }
}

After you merge this pull request, Greenkeeper will create a new branch whenever a dependency is updated, with the new version applied. The branch creation should trigger your testing services and check whether your code still works with the new dependency version. Depending on the the results of these tests Greenkeeper will try to open meaningful and helpful pull requests and issues, so your dependencies remain working and up-to-date.

-  "underscore": "^1.6.0"
+  "underscore": "^1.7.0"

The above example shows an in-range update. 1.7.0 is included in the old ^1.6.0 range, because of the caret ^ character .
When the test services report success Greenkeeper will silently delete the branch again, because no action needs to be taken – everything is fine.

However, should the tests fail, Greenkeeper will create an issue to inform you about the problem immediately.

This way, you’ll never be surprised by a dependency breaking your code. As long as everything still works, Greenkeeper will stay out of your way, and as soon as something goes wrong, you’ll be the first to know.

-  "lodash": "^3.0.0"
+  "lodash": "^4.0.0"

In this example, the new version 4.0.0 is not included in the old ^3.0.0 range.
For version updates like these – let’s call them “out of range” updates – you’ll receive a pull request.

This means that you no longer need to check for new versions manually – Greenkeeper will keep you up to date automatically.

These pull requests not only serve as reminders to update: If you have solid tests and good coverage, and the pull requests passes those tests, you can very likely just merge it and release a new version of your software straight away

To get a better idea of which ranges apply to which releases, check out the extremely useful semver calculator provided by npm.

There is a collection of frequently asked questions. If those don’t help, you can always ask the humans behind Greenkeeper.