Youe package

So you have your really cool open source project. Now what?

npm publish

Yep, now your package is public and anyone can use it.

Show must go on…

You are continously improving your package, adding features and fix bugs…

Now you need to update your published package, so that you can share the love with the big world. If you’ll try to run npm publish, it will fail. You need to bump your package version first.

You can just change the version in your package.json and then run npm publish.

Meet semver

semver is a modern approach for managing package versions.

TL;DR;

A package version should have a format of x.y.z:

• x: MAJOR version: should increment on api break.
• y: MINOR version: should increment on api change.
• z: PATCH version: should increment on every tiny change (bug fixes)

npm version

Instead of changing the version in package.json manually, you can use the npm version command:

i.e.

npm version patch

What does this do?

1. change the version in package.json
2. commit the change (git commit)
3. create a git tag

Since npm version command is using git commands, it’s better that your git working diractory will be clean from any unstaged/uncommitted changes

git tag

Git tags are simple pointers, like branches, that point to a commit in the commit tree.

You can think of tags as read-only pointers, that once you’ve set a tag to a commit it stays forever, as apposed to branches which are read-and-write pointers, that are changed to point to your latest commit on your branch.

This allows us to continue working on the project, and still keep “bookmarks” of all our previous versions that were published.

git push

Since we’ve mode some code changes (to package.json), we now need to push the changes back to git origin. We also want to push the new created tag:

git push && git push --tags 

We can also use the follow-tags flag:

git push --follow-tags

npm publish

Now git origin has all the data about our new release. All that’s left is to publish it to npm repository:

npm publish