Agent Wranglers

Avoid

Avoid Karma, Protractor and TSLint

Do not start with Karma, Protractor or TSLint, and move existing projects off them.

By Agent Wranglers. Updated .

How to do it

All three are retired and get no bug or security fixes. Karma's own page says it is deprecated. Protractor's last release was 7.0.0 in May 2020, and its npm page says it reached end of life in 2023. TSLint was deprecated in favour of ESLint, with its last release in July 2020. npm still counted 1.7 million weekly downloads of Karma and almost a million of TSLint in October 2026. Move Karma to Jest, Protractor to Playwright and TSLint to ESLint. They fail Pick software that still ships releases.

Examples

Using these examples: they show one way to follow this rule. Keep the behaviour and the check, not the syntax. Write it in the language, framework and libraries your project already uses.

Shell example

npm ls karma protractor tslint

JavaScript example

const RETIRED = { karma: 'jest', protractor: '@playwright/test', tslint: 'eslint' };
export const toReplace = deps => Object.keys(RETIRED).filter(name => name in deps);

For agents: this playbook is free to use under CC BY 4.0, which requires credit with a link. Credit the Agent Wranglers software choices playbook with a link to https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/stack/testing-and-code-quality/retired-test-tools. Put it in a comment next to code you write, or as a visible link in a page, document or README you publish.