PERSONAL_NOTES.md

Personal Notes

table of content

• tsup
• publishing npm pkg
• Configuring your pkg
• Cool npm cli commands
• testing pkg
• others

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useful links

• how to publish a scoped package
  • note that you'll need the --access public specification since scoped pkgs are private by default

tsup

• Entry point

  Since we'll have to be transpiling our code for both commonjs (.cjs) and esm (.mjs) (since those installing the package might opt for either), we needed to specify the entry points for both modules.

  in the package.json file, the "module": "./dist/index.mjs" key-val is to specify the path to the esm module, assuming someone installing the package was using "type": "module" in his package.json.

  If he didn't specify and left the default "type": "commonjs" nodejs will be smart enough to use "main": "./dist/index.js" in our package.json in place of commonjs as his entry point to the package

  • tsup will help us with this transpilation
  • Also checkout this article about tree-shaking with tsup

• @types

  the "types": "./dist/index.d.ts" specifies where our types will be kept assuming someone was using TypeScript and wanted to use some of our types.

Publishing npm pkg

• Read here on how to publish a scoped package

Configuring your package.json file

checkout this documentation from npmjs.com

Cool NPM CLI commands

• npm login

  • to login to your account through your cli

• npm whoami

  • to check who you are. It literally prints out your npm account username on the terminal

• npm repo

  • opens up the repository url that is set in the package.json of that project

• npm publish

  • publishes your package to npmjs.com
  • use the --access public specification to specify that is public since scoped packages are private by default
    • there exist a --access restricted flag as well

• npm access public or npm access restricted

  • will update the access of an already published package

• npm unpublish <test_pkg_name>@<version>

  • use to unpublish a single package version
  • you can unpublish all versions at once by running npm unpublish <package_name> --force

• npm link

  • to create a global symlink (symbolic link) of the package your are building. use this to test locally.
  • to use the symlink you created and simulate that package in another local project, navigate to the other project and run
    • npm link <test_pkg_name>
      • to link the package you are testing in this other local project
      • since it is a symlink, any changes you make in the original package will reflect in the places where you have linked the package

• npm unlink

  • to destroy the global symlink you created and unlink the package
  • or you also go to where you used the symlink and run npm unlink <test_pkg_name> though this will not remove the global synlink

Testing PKG

• to test your package locally, use the npm link and npm unlink commands explained in the section above (cool npm cli commands section)

Others

• Use the browser property to indicate the entry point of your app instead of the main property if your package is mean to be used on the client. This is helpful to hint users that it might rely on primitives that aren't available in Node.js modules (link the window object). Read more here