Node Meetup Malmö, March 2014

Quick presentation on some good things to know about if one want to publish a package on npm

Transcript

1. npm publishing by Pelle Wessman, @voxpelli
2. package.json the core of it all
3. CommonJS Based on the Packages/1.0 spec
4. npm is basically the registry and the registry client (developed by Isaac Z. Schlueter – npm, Inc.)
5. Required fields • name – should be URL-safe! (and no ”js”, ”node”) • version – semantic please! http://semver.org/
 1.0.0 === Major.Minor.Patch version
6. Important field ”private”: ”true” if you don’t want to publish!
7. Info fields • description • repository • homepage • bugs • author • (README.md – and please – a changelog somewhere!) • (http://npmjs.org/~ – your social media and geek media (IRC) links!)
8. Code fields • main – the one field that node.js itself uses • directories – directories.lib / directories.example
9. Env fields • engines – should define ”node • engineStrict
10. Global module fields • preferGlobal – results in warning on local install • bin / directories.bin • man / directories.man
11. Script fields • scripts – test / start / lots-of-fun-stuffs • config – for the above scripts
12. dependencies
13. devDependencies
14. • bundledDependencies • optionalDependencies • peerDependencies
15. .npmignore Defaults to .gitignore + eg. .DS_Store, .git, npm-debug.log Good for excluding tests, examples etc. from packages
16. Compiled modules… …stuff for them to – but lets save that for another time
17. Commands for the publisher
18. npm publish npm publish or
 npm publish https://github.com/voxpelli/foo/archive/v0.2.5.tar.gz
19. npm publish —tag <foo> for prereleases, betas, alphas, dev-releases etc npm install foo@dev
20. • npm deprecate – package or version range • npm version <major,minor,patch,1.33.7>
21. npm link to use your module locally during development (…but exclude the global npm folder from OS X Time Machine)
22. Other use cases Not just Node.js uses NPM, but also Browserify, Ender.js etc.