About Semantic Versioning Analyzer

Analyze and calculate semantic versioning with major, minor, patch increments. Part of the DevTools Surf developer suite. Browse more tools in the Developer Utilities collection.

Use Cases

• Determine whether a dependency update is a patch, minor, or major change before upgrading.
• Validate version string format in CI pipelines before publishing a package.
• Calculate the next version number based on the type of changes made since the last release.
• Document breaking changes in a CHANGELOG aligned with major version bumps.

Tips

• Increment MAJOR for any breaking change to the public API — even small breaking changes, including removing a deprecated field, require a major bump.
• Pre-release versions (1.2.0-alpha.1) have lower precedence than the release version (1.2.0) — clearly document what 'alpha' or 'beta' means for your stability guarantees.
• Use ~X.Y.Z in npm to pin the patch version range and ^X.Y.Z to pin the minor version range — understand the difference before publishing a semver constraint in package.json.

Fun Facts

• Semantic Versioning (SemVer) was proposed by Tom Preston-Werner (co-founder of GitHub) in 2011 and published at semver.org. It was rapidly adopted by npm and became the de facto standard for open-source packages.
• npm's registry enforces semver: you cannot publish a version that already exists, and version numbers must be monotonically increasing — preventing the 'left-pad incident' pattern of package deletion.
• The left-pad incident (2016) removed an 11-line npm package that thousands of projects depended on, breaking builds worldwide — a turning point that led to stronger semver and dependency pinning practices.

FAQ

When should I use 0.x.y versions?

Version 0.x.y signals that the public API is not yet stable. Any minor version bump (0.1.0 -> 0.2.0) may include breaking changes. Once the API is stable, release 1.0.0.

Does adding a new optional function parameter require a major bump?

If it is additive and backward-compatible (existing callers continue to work), it is a minor bump. If existing callers break because of calling convention changes, it is a major bump.