package.json how to deprecate a project dependency?

Question

Is it possible to mark a project dependency as deprecated without removing it from the project.

So other developers don't use it in future

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I have a project that was built on Material-UI V4 and have recently added Mui-V5 with the intention that all new work is built on V5. I'd like developers to see an IDE warning when they import components from the old dependency.

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One thought I had is to use patch-package to modify Mui-V4 and set it as deprecated in package.json but this warning only shows on npm install.

Answer 1

Adding this as an answer, as the comment above worked great. ESLint's no-restricted-imports rule works great for deprecating external library imports.

It can be set as following (see the docs for more examples):

  rules: {
    // Deprecate redux
    'no-restricted-imports': [
      'warn',
      {
        paths: ['react-redux'],
      },
    ],
  }

This will show an IDE warning when importing anything from that module.

For deprecating local methods in your project, you can use the @deprecated JSDoc tag which will also generate a strikethrough warning in the IDE.