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Publish your Node library to npm

— 2 minute read
It looks like you've found one of my older posts 😅 It's possible that some of the information may be out of date (or just plain wrong!) If you've still found the post helpful, but feel like it could use some improvement, let me know on Twitter.

Alright, contuing from yesterday we want to take our little Node module and make it available to the world as a really awesome command line tool.

The first thing we need to do is register an NPM account.

npm adduser

Fill in your credentials and it should be ready to go.

If we have any dependencies they should be added to our package.json file. Our simple compliment program doesn't need any extra libraries but we'll add xml2json just to demonstrate how it's done.

{
  "name": "compliment",
  "version": "0.0.1",
  "description": "Tell us how awesome we are.",
  "preferGlobal": "true",
  "bin": { "compliment": "compliment.js" },
  "author": "Rob Dodson",
  "dependencies": {
    "xml2json": "0.2.4"
  },
  "engines": { "node": "*" }
}

Since we've changed our package.json we need to run npm link again to install the dependency. After that you should have a node_modules/ folder in your project root.

Let's put this baby under version control!

git init
echo node_modules/ >> .gitignore # node_modules should be installed by npm
git add .
git commit -am 'Initial commit'

Final step:

npm publish

BOOMJAMS! We have us an npm module! - Rob

You should follow me on Twitter here.

  • Mood: Hyper
  • Sleep: 5
  • Hunger: 1
  • Coffee: 1

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