dead-deps — what happened to your dependencies

Is nodeunit still maintained?

No — nodeunit stopped being maintained around July 2018. No single package succeeded nodeunit; the fix depends on what you were using it for.

Status
No longer maintained
Last maintained
July 2018
Use instead
Nothing directly — remove the dependency
Succession
Successor named by the maintainers
Drop-in
not applicable
Confidence
low

What replaced nodeunit?

No single package succeeded nodeunit; the fix depends on what you were using it for. There is nothing to swap in, so plan the change rather than the upgrade.

Getting off nodeunit

nodeunit's test.equal/test.done callback style has no direct equivalent; the closest structural match for existing suites is tape or the built-in node:test, both of which pass an assertion object into each test.

Why nodeunit is on this list

nodeunit is marked deprecated on npm and its README carries a "DEPRECATED PROJECT" section explaining that the maintainers saw no reason to keep developing it given how many actively maintained runners exist. The README names tap, ava, tape, mocha, jasmine and jest rather than a single successor, so there is no consensus replacement. Node's built-in node:test module is now also an option that needs no dependency at all.

Reasonable engineers still disagree about the replacement — read the alternatives before committing.

nodeunit alternatives

Beyond the primary recommendation, these are credible for nodeunit's use case:

Check your own project for nodeunit

npx dead-deps --all --min-state unmaintained

Run that in the directory holding your lockfile. If nodeunit is anywhere in your tree — a direct dependency or buried under something else — it appears in the report with this verdict, this successor and the same evidence links, alongside anything else that has stopped moving. Nothing is uploaded; the scan reads your lockfile locally and queries public registry metadata.

Exit code 1 means something was flagged, which makes npx dead-deps --min-state deprecated usable as a CI gate. See how verdicts are produced.

Evidence

Every claim on this page traces to a primary source. Check them:

See the full index of covered packages, or read the methodology for how a verdict is reached and why a quiet package is not a dead one.