laoban-dev

Publishing to NPM with laoban

Overview

Laoban can be used to publish to npmjs. This is a very common use case, and laoban has been designed to make this as easy as possible. If you follow the ‘default’ project structure all you need to do is to create your NPM_TOKEN environment variable

This document is for typescript projects, but the same principles apply to javascript projects

Initial Setup for the first publish

• Ensure that package.json has the correct files section
• Ensure that package.json has the correct main section
• Ensure that package.json has the correct types section
• Enable publishing in the package.details.json file
• If you want private publishing you need to modify the publish script in the laoban.json file
• Add the NPM_TOKEN to the environment

To actually publish

• Run laoban update --major or laoban update --minor
• Run laoban publish

The files section

This is provided in the default templates as

{
  "files": [
    "dist/index.js",
    "dist/index.d.ts",
    "dist/src/"
  ]
}

It means that laoban is expecting a ‘index.ts’ in the same package as the package.json file, and the rest of the code in the src directory. The dist directory is where the compiled code is put.

If you have a different structure you need to make a new template and modify the files section. However this is a good default structure, and you might consider changing to it

Main and types

Main is the ‘entry point’ for the package. This is the file that is loaded when you do require('my-package'). Types is the file that is loaded when you do import {MyClass} from 'my-package'. These are both in the dist directory.

If you have a different structure you need to make a new template and modify the main and type section.

{
  "main":  "dist/index",
  "types": "dist/index"
}

Enable publishing in the package.details.json file

Each package has a package.details.json file. In the guards section there is a publish value that is set to false. In order to publish you need to set this to true

{
  "guards": {
    "publish": true
  }
}

Version numbers

The current version number of all the packages is in the versions.txt file. This is updated by the laoban update command.

laoban update --major
laoban update --minor
laoban update --setVersion xxx

Calling these updates that file, then updates the files in all the projects with the new version number (and any template changes)

This site is open source. Improve this page.