Browserslist: Should we run npx browserslist@latest --update-db regularly?

[rj-david]

We are using browserslist to display to our users if their browsers are out-of-date (we also use it on a number of things during development like eslint-plugin-compat). Thanks for this wonderful work, by the way.

Recently, we had issues that new Edge browsers (desktop and android) are being tagged as out of date. We saw an issue a few days ago and the solution was to run

npx browserslist@latest --update-db

So, our question is if we need to run it regularly? During our CI/CD, we run this to update our regex patterns for useragents

browserslist-useragent-regexp --allowHigherVersions

Thinking to add the update before this if it will make sense.

[ai]

So, our question is if we need to run it regularly?

Yeap. Run it every few months.

It updates the caniuse-lite database with browsers. With all data last 2 versions or >1% will return old browsers and Autoprefixer/Babel will insert polyfills for browsers, which nobody really uses nowadays.

Another option will be to run npm update, but it will update all your dependencies, which will force you to run the full QA process.

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[nksfrank]

Is there any documentation on this function in the repo?

[ai]

@nksfrank nope, we just show it in the new warning text.

Do you want to send a PR to the docs?