Automatic Publishing of npm Packages

If you are actively maintaining more than a couple of packages in the npm registry this will be a life saver for you; automatically publish new versions of your packages directly from your CI server 📡

As the only package maintainer at the Norwegian Trekking Association, and currently maintaining 16 packages in the public npm registry, time is of essence. Anything that can ease the burden of maintaining all the packages is a welcomed addition 😅

• Also read: Tagging software releases with git and GitHub

The problem

So what exactly is the problem we are trying to solve? The npm publish command requires the user to be authenticated before they can publish. If you publish from multiple machines and/or have multiple maintainers you will need to make sure that all of those are authenticated with npm.

By “manually” having to publish to npm you introduce the risk of publishing versions that do not pass the tests (you do have tests right?!), and introduce the possibility of inconsistencies between published versions.

npm publish

The npm publish (and more recently npm adduser) commands requires some user interaction to type in user credentials. This makes it problematic for use on servers since there is no user there to type in the username and password.

Because of this limitation some CI servers offers plugins or addons to make the integration with npm easier for maintainers.

npm publish for Travis CI

Travis CI can automatically release your npm package to the npm registry after a successful build. All you need to do is add the following to your .travis.yml configuration:

deploy:
  provider: npm
  api_key: "YOUR API KEY"
  on:
    - tags: true

• Also Read: npm Releasing - Travis CI

npm publish for Wercker CI

Wercker CI can automatically release your npm package to the npm registry after a successful build. All you need to do is add the following to your wercker.yml configuration and add the NPM_TOKEN environment variable:

deploy:
  steps:
    - turistforeningen/npm-publish

You also need to add your NPM_TOKEN as an Environment Variable to your Deploy Pipeline in the Wercker settings page for your project.

• Also checkout: turistforeningen/wercker-npm-publish