minimum-release-age prevents ng update

@mattharr

Issue #31232 proposed minimumReleaseAge (or min-release-age) as a feature for ng update. As it did not get enough upvotes to bring this idea to the backlog.

But using minimumReleaseAge create a real problem, when trying to update angular.

What I have
a small project with angular@21.2.8 (esday-demo-angular).

min-release-age=7 in .npmrc

What I did

ng update @angular/core@^21 @angular/cli@^21

What I got

The installed Angular CLI version is outdated.
Installing a temporary Angular CLI versioned 21.2.9 to perform the update.
An unhandled exception occurred: Process exited with code 1.
See "C:\Users\Berni\AppData\Local\Temp\ng-mGkIxv\angular-errors.log" for further details.

The content of the logfile:

[error] Error: Process exited with code 1.
    at ChildProcess.<anonymous> (D:\Projekte\github\esday-demo-angular\node_modules\@angular\cli\src\package-managers\host.js:65:28)
    at ChildProcess.emit (node:events:509:28)
    at maybeClose (node:internal/child_process:1124:16)
    at ChildProcess._handle.onexit (node:internal/child_process:306:5)

my interpretation of what happended

ng update looks for the latest available version of @angular/cli in npmjs
ng finds v21.2.9
ng tries to install this version as a temporary version
npm (or any other package manager) prevents the installation of @angular/cli@21.2.9 as this version was published only 2 days ago (today is 2026-05-02).
ng updates emits the error An unhandled exception occurred

So to me it looks like ng update cannot simply ignore the setting min-release-age of the used package manager (or how this option is named in the different package mangers - e.g. pnpm uses "minimumReleaseAge").

IMHO this concerns also the last comments in issue #31232 (e.g. by @mattharr in #31232

Just an addendum:

Even trying to "outsmart" ng update by using ng update @angular/core@^21.2.8 @angular/cli@^21.2.8
returned the same result:

The installed Angular CLI version is outdated.
Installing a temporary Angular CLI versioned 21.2.9 to perform the update.
An unhandled exception occurred: Process exited with code 1.
See "C:\Users\Berni\AppData\Local\Temp\ng-oZcrpN\angular-errors.log" for further details.

I suppose that you noticed that issue #31232 described a new feature, while this issue describes a real bug?!

Yeah I got confused, the last comments refered to the same issue as you did.

Sorry for that.

Just another addendum (😄):
the described problem prevents that ng update can be used in the period after publishing a new version and the time defined in minimumReleaseAge. If new versions came to fast, ng update could not be used at all any more (ok that is a very hypothetical scenario).

The same issue is occuring when using ng add. Example:

.npmrc

min-release-age=1

> ng add angular-eslint
✔ Determining Package Manager
  › Using package manager: npm
✔ Searching for compatible package version
  › Found compatible package version: 21.4.0.
✔ Loading package information
✔ Confirming installation
✖ Package installation failed: Process exited with code 1.
  Output: npm error code ETARGET
  npm error notarget No matching version found for angular-eslint@^21.4.0 with a date before
   5/13/2026, 1:49:29 PM.
  npm error notarget In most cases you or one of your dependencies are requesting a package
  version that doesn't exist.
  npm error A complete log of this run can be found in:
  /home/chronob/.npm/_logs/2026-05-14T11_49_29_886Z-debug-0.log

angular-eslint v21.4.0 was released less than one day ago so npm can't install it but the ng add command finds it.

Same thing happens with yarn and its npmMinimalAgeGate, looks like it's the same exact error too. But I guess this issue and the linked PR will only concern installation with npm?😕

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minimum-release-age prevents ng update #33119

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minimum-release-age prevents ng update #33119

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BePo65 commented on May 2, 2026

BePo65 commented on May 2, 2026

JeanMeche commented on May 2, 2026

BePo65 commented on May 2, 2026

chronoB commented on May 14, 2026

Cynaeon commented on Jun 3, 2026

angular-automatic-lock-bot commented on Jul 18, 2026

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