What does “^” mean in the node.js dependency list?

Question

I just update my dependencies and it automatically places the “^” character. What dose does this mean? There is nothing in the documentation.

Example

"bower": "^ 1.2.8",

I could also find it in some of the npm commits https://github.com/npm/npm/commit/ce662561ca0a7b154a7e6058a6a2428b49bd7266 https://www.npmjs.org/doc/json.html

Answer 1

This is part of the syntax for semver.

From https://www.npmjs.org/doc/misc/semver.html

^1.2.3: = >=1.2.3-0 <2.0.0-0 " 1.2.3". , - ( ) , ( ).

, bower 1.2.8, bower 2.0.0.