Comparison with related tools

"Cooldown" means refusing to install a release that's only been public for a short time. It's one of several strategies for hardening your dependency intake. This page lays out where chill-out sits relative to other tools that touch the same problem, so you can decide which combination fits your workflow.

At a glance

The rest of this page expands the differences and explains where the tools complement each other.

Renovate and Dependabot: cooldown at PR time

Both Renovate and Dependabot have first-class cooldown features. Renovate calls it minimumReleaseAge; Dependabot calls it cooldown. Both prevent the bot from opening a PR that bumps a dependency to a version that's younger than the configured window, and both let you tune the window per-package or per-update-type.

This is exactly the right shape for the bots — they're the ones proposing upgrades, so the gate naturally lives where the proposal is made. The trade-offs vs. chill-out:

• They only gate the bot. A human (or another tool) can still run npm install some-package and pull a fresh release directly into the lockfile. chill-out runs against whatever's already on disk, so it catches that case.
• They run on a schedule. The cooldown is enforced when the bot next wakes up. chill-out is a one-shot CLI you can run in pre-commit, in CI on every PR, or locally before pushing.
• Dependabot's cooldown only covers version updates (not security updates) and a subset of ecosystems. Renovate covers more ground but requires self-hosting or a Mend-hosted instance for full control.
• Neither tool fixes existing lockfiles. If a fresh release already landed in your lockfile before cooldown was configured, the bot won't help you back it out. chill-out fix proposes a rollback to the most recent safely-aged version.

If you're already running Renovate or Dependabot with cooldown, you probably don't need chill-out for the bot's PRs. You may still want it for everything else: developer-initiated installs, post-incident sweeps of existing lockfiles, and CI gating on PRs that the bots didn't open.

Resolver-level date cutoffs

uv's exclude-newer setting tells the resolver to ignore any package version released after a given timestamp. It's a clean way to pin a whole project to "the world as of date X" — extremely useful for reproducible builds, release engineering, and conservative environments. Some npm tooling exposes a similar idea (e.g. --before in pacote/npm-pick-manifest internals), though it's not surfaced as a stable top-level npm CLI flag.

The shape is fundamentally different from cooldown:

• Date cutoff vs. rolling window. exclude-newer = 2025-01-01 pins everyone to that fixed date. A cooldown window of "3 days" rolls forward continuously and lets new releases age in.
• Resolver-level vs. audit-level. exclude-newer is enforced during resolution, so it shapes the lockfile at write time. chill-out audits a lockfile after the fact (and proposes rollbacks).
• Per-ecosystem. exclude-newer is uv-specific. chill-out gives you one configuration shape that covers npm and PyPI together.

These are complementary. A team running uv with exclude-newer for deterministic resolution can still run chill-out to check whether the pinned versions would have passed cooldown if installed today, or to gate the moment the cutoff is bumped forward.

Supply-chain scanners (Socket, Snyk, etc.)

Tools like Socket, Snyk, and similar scanners are often mentioned alongside cooldown but solve a different problem. They look at known vulnerabilities, malware signatures, suspicious install scripts, dependency ownership changes, and other supply-chain risk signals. They tell you what's known to be wrong with a release.

Cooldown tells you we don't yet know if anything is wrong with a release, and asks you to wait for signals to emerge. The two strategies stack:

• A scanner protects against threats already cataloged.
• Cooldown protects against the window in which a fresh compromise is novel and uncataloged.

If your threat model includes the scenario where a maintainer's publishing token is stolen and a malicious release goes up at 9 AM, no vulnerability database will know about it at 9:01 AM. Cooldown buys time for the disclosure cycle to catch up.

Hand-rolled CI scripts

Plenty of teams ship a small script in CI that walks the lockfile, queries the registry for publication timestamps, and fails the build if anything is too fresh. That works, and chill-out is built to replace it with something less bespoke.

What you typically don't get for free in a hand-rolled script:

• Multi-ecosystem support with a single config shape
• Rollback planning that respects existing version constraints
• Detection of shared transitive dependencies and routing fixes through the right manifest field (e.g. workspace overrides)
• Async, parallel registry queries with caching

If you've already written the script and it covers your needs, there's no urgent reason to switch. If you're about to write one, chill-out will probably get you further faster.

Where chill-out fits

The shortest summary: chill-out is a CLI auditor for cooldown violations, designed to run anywhere — locally, in CI, in pre-commit — against existing lockfiles, with optional automatic fixes. It overlaps with Renovate and Dependabot at the policy layer (what counts as too fresh) but not at the enforcement layer (when and where the policy is checked). It pairs naturally with supply-chain scanners and resolver-level date pinning rather than replacing either.

Next stops

• Quickstart to try chill-out against a real project in a couple of minutes
• Configuration for tuning thresholds and include_groups
• Ecosystems for the package managers chill-out understands
• GitHub Actions for the CI integration that pairs with Dependabot or Renovate