What should you do when opensource package is not maintained anymore

Imagine you are using some npm or pip package and you feel it is outdated or it just says somewhere "is not maintained anymore". What should you do first - find out whether there is someone else who already started maintaining, let me show you how to do it 😉

How to understand the package is not maintained anymore

First, find the page of the interesting package on the source code hosting website. I will consider [email protected] package for npm, I know that I am using exactly this package by package.json or package-lock.json file.

To find the opensource hosting page, first, we should find the package name on https://npmjs.com with the exact name.

NOTE: Name is very important when you try find a package sources page☝. Please carefully follow the sequence otherwise you can mix up a packages an all your effort will be lost. This happens very often

Now look at Repository or Homepage: Here we see so "dead" package:

The first solution to try when "repo is not maintained anymore"

Click on forks number and find out the most popular fork. To understand popularity faster we might assume that a more popular fork will have more forks. So we should just find the longest fork chain and see who is on second level after original repo:

So we've found https://github.com/vusion/webfonts-generator by vusion which also re-published it to a new npm package, we can see this by checking Readme file:

npm install --save-dev vusion-webfonts-generator

Here how it works. In the worst case, you can fork a project and start maintaining it or just use it by yourself for your fixes✌