Semantic Versioning Checker
Compare two semver strings to see which takes precedence, and generate the correct major/minor/patch bump for a given version.
1.4.2 is older than 1.10.0
Bump 1.4.2
Follows semver 2.0.0 precedence rules: a version with a prerelease tag (1.0.0-alpha) always ranks below the same version without one (1.0.0), and prerelease identifiers compare piece by piece, with numeric identifiers sorting before alphabetic ones at the same position.
Frequently asked questions
What do major, minor, and patch actually signal?+
By convention: major means a breaking change, minor means new functionality that's backward-compatible, patch means a backward-compatible bug fix. Following this consistently is what lets tools like npm safely auto-update patch and minor versions without breaking anything.
Why does 1.0.0 rank higher than 1.0.0-alpha?+
A prerelease tag specifically marks a version as not yet ready for general use, so semver's precedence rules always rank the plain release above any prerelease of the same version number, regardless of what the prerelease tag says.
Does build metadata (the +something suffix) affect version comparison?+
No, per the semver 2.0.0 spec, build metadata is explicitly ignored when determining precedence. Two versions differing only in build metadata (1.0.0+build1 vs 1.0.0+build2) are considered equal for comparison purposes.