Publishing My First NPM Package

Intro

I published my first package, jellybean, to npm! I actually published the package back when I first created the repository in September, just to experiment. However, it didn't work back then and I kind of forgot about it after that. This week, I fixed up the issues I was having and now it works. In this post, I'll be explaining the process of how I published the package and fixed the issues I previously encountered.

Preparing a Project to be Published

I decided to publish my program to npm since it's the most common package manager for JavaScript programs. There are a few steps I followed in order to prepare the program to be published. First, in the package.json file, I added main and bin parameters. In addition, you need to have name and version parameters as well. For example, here is a snippet from my package.json file:

{  "name": "jellybean",  "version": "1.0.10",  "description": "From one small program, you can create an entire website. Jellybean is a static site generator created in Node.js that lets you easily convert your text/markdown files into HTML.",  "main": "src/index.js",  "bin": {    "jellybean": "src/index.js"  }}

Name and version are pretty self-explanatory, but main specifies the main entry point into the program and bin specifies the command to run the associated executable file. In this case, when a user runs the command "jellybean" after installing the package, the file "src/index.js" will be executed. In addition, each time I published to npm, I incremented the version and if you forget to do so, you will receive an error message.

In addition, I added the line:

#!/usr/bin/env node

To the top of the file to be executed ("src/index.js" in this case), which specifies that the program should be run in a node environment.

Testing the Project

Before publishing to npm, I tested the program by running:

npm link

From within the same directory as the repository. Then I ran the program as if it had already been published (eg. running jellybean --version would print the version number, etc.). You can read more about how to use npm link here.

Publishing the Project

Next, I published the program by running the commands:

npm addusernpm publish

npm adduser creates or links to your npm account. npm publish publishes your package, which you should run each time you want to update your package.

Problems I Encountered

Although the steps described above are quite simple, I encountered some problems along the way. Because I originally published the package in September and installed it, I had an older version of the jellybean files in my C:\Users\...\AppData\Roaming
pm folder. Therefore, every time I tried to run the jellybean command, I got the following error:

& : The term '/user/bin/env.exe' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. Checkthe spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again.

I fixed this issue by deleting the old files from the npm folder and once I published my package to npm, I reinstalled it globally and was able to successfully run the program.

Testing

I partnered with another student from my class, Suhhee, in order to test each other's programs. When Suhhee tested my program, she received the following error:

Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, open 'src/layout.html'    at Object.openSync (fs.js:498:3)    at Object.readFileSync (fs.js:394:35)    at getHtmlLayout 

Because of this, I changed my file paths from relative to absolute paths using path.resolve() so that the program can be run from any directory. For example instead of:

return fs.readFileSync(        'src/index.html',        'utf8'    );

I updated the code to:

return fs.readFileSync(        path.resolve(__dirname, '../src/layout.html'),        'utf8'    );

Conclusion

In conclusion, the process of setting up an npm package was pretty straightforward, other than a few problems that I was able to resolve. Over the past almost three months, I've been working on this project every week and getting to publish it was a great end to this journey. If you're interested in trying out the program, you can read more about it here or run:

npm install -g jellybeanjellybean --help

To get started. Thanks so much for reading!