@hutson/npm-deploy-git-tag

Deploy a package to an npm-compatible registry using the latest git tag from that package's repository.

Deploying a package to an npm-compatible registry may include:

• Updating a package.json file with a new version number (One that matches an existing git tag).
• Writing an authentication token to an .npmrc file.
• Running npm publish.

By automating these steps @hutson/npm-deploy-git-tag alleviates some of the overhead in managing a project, allowing you to quickly and consistently deploy enhancements that provide value to your consumers.

Table of Contents

• Features
• Installation
• Usage
  • CLI Options
  • How the Deploy Happens
  • Continuous Integration and Delivery (CID) Setup
• Deploying Elsewhere Besides Public npm Registry
• Security Disclosure Policy
• Professional Support
• Debugging
• Node Support Policy
• Contributing

Features

• [x] Get latest tag from current project using git-semver-tags.
• [x] Write the version number to the project's package.json file using read-pkg and write-pkg.
• [x] Deploy package to an npm-compatible registry with set-npm-auth-token-for-ci.

Installation

To install the @hutson/npm-deploy-git-tag tool for use in your project's deploy process please run the following command:

yarn add [--dev] @hutson/npm-deploy-git-tag

Usage

There are two ways to use @hutson/npm-deploy-git-tag, either as a CLI tool, or programmatically.

To learn how @hutson/npm-deploy-git-tag can be used to automatically deploy your project after you've pushed new changes to your repository, please see the Continuous Integration and Delivery (CID) Setup section below.

CLI Tool

Call @hutson/npm-deploy-git-tag from within your project's top folder:

$(yarn bin)/npm-deploy-git-tag --token ${NPM_TOKEN}

Programmatically

const npmDeployGitTag = require(`@hutson/npm-deploy-git-tag`);

const config = {
	/**
	 * Options are the camelCase form of their respective CLI flag.
	 */

	/**
	 * The `--access` option can be set like so:
	 */
	access: `restricted`,

	/**
	 * The `--token` option can be set like so:
	 */
	token: `token`,
};

try {
	const result = await npmDeployGitTag(config);
	/* Package successfully deployed to an npm registry. */
} catch (error) {
	/* Do any exception handling here. */
}

CLI Options

The following CLI options are supported and can be passed to @hutson/npm-deploy-git-tag:

[--help]

Help on using the CLI.

$(yarn bin)/npm-deploy-git-tag --help

[--access <public|restricted>] - Documentation available on npm website.

Deploying a scoped package as a public package requires that you set --access to public.

$(yarn bin)/npm-deploy-git-tag --access public

If you attempt to deploy a scoped package as restricted, but you do not have a paid account with Npm Inc., you will receive an error similar to the following:

npm ERR! publish Failed PUT 402
npm ERR! code E402
npm ERR! "You must sign up for private packages" : @scope/example-package

[--tag ]

Specify the distribution tag to use as an alias for the deployed package.

$(yarn bin)/npm-deploy-git-tag --tag next

In this example, the package will be deployed to the npm-compatible registry, and the published package will be pointed at by the next distribution tag.

Once deployed, you can install the deployment using the tag name:

yarn add package-name@next

[--token ]

If the npm-compatible registry does not require authentication (such as a local, offline, registry, or a registry used exclusively for testing), or you have already setup your project's, or CI's, .npmrc configuration file with the proper authentication, then you do not need to set the --token option.

Otherwise, to deploy a package to an npm-compatible registry you must set the --token option with a valid npm token.

The account associated with the npm token may own, or co-own, the package on the npm-compatible registry for the deploy task to succeed. It may also succeed if the package does not already exist on the npm-compatible registry.

$(yarn bin)/npm-deploy-git-tag --token ${NPM_TOKEN}

How the Deploy Happens

First step of @hutson/npm-deploy-git-tag is to get the latest git tag on the current branch for your project and treat it as a semantically valid version number. With the version number in hand, we write the version number to the version field within your project's package.json file. Writing the version number to your project's package.json allows us to deploy your package regardless of how you tag, or otherwise, update, your project's version.

Once your project's package.json file has been updated, if you have specified the --token option, we update the local, or globa, .npmrc file to use the token (By setting the NPM_TOKEN environment variable within the publishing process).

Lastly, @hutson/npm-deploy-git-tag deploys your package to either the authoritative npm registry, or an alternative npm-compatible registry (Please see Publishing Elsewhere Besides Public npm Registry to learn how to use an alternative registry).

Continuous Integration and Delivery (CID) Setup

Since @hutson/npm-deploy-git-tag relies on an npm authentication token, and a package deployed to the public npm registry, @hutson/npm-deploy-git-tag works on any Git-based continuous integration platforms; such as GitLab CI, Travis CI, CircleCI etc.

However, given the enormous number of CI providers available, we will only cover the CI system built into GitLab.

Configuring a GitLab CI job is facilitated through a .gitlab-ci.yml configuration file kept at the root of your project. To deploy a package using @hutson/npm-deploy-git-tag you will need to create a dedicated job that executes only after a new git tag has been pushed to your repository.

That can be done with GitLab CI by creating a job called deploy, though any name will work. Within the deploy job install your project's dependencies, run any build required to transpile your code, and finally, call @hutson/npm-deploy-git-tag.

You can see a snippet of a .gitlab-ci.yml file below with this setup:

deploy:
	before_script:
		- yarn install --frozen-lockfile
	image: node:8
	only:
		- tags
	script:
		- $(yarn bin)/npm-deploy-git-tag --token ${NPM_TOKEN}

@hutson/npm-deploy-git-tag works well with tools like @hutson/semantic-delivery-gitlab. @hutson/semantic-delivery-gitlab creates a git tag based on unreleased commits and pushes that tag to GitLab. Assuming the setup above, once the tag has been pushed to GitLab, your project's deploy job would execute, and @hutson/npm-deploy-git-tag would deploy your package to your desired npm-compatible registry.

Full documentation for GitLab CI is available on the GitLab CI site.

Deploying Elsewhere Besides Public npm Registry

It's possible to deploy your package to any npm-compatible registry, not just the official public registry. When deploying a package @hutson/npm-deploy-git-tag uses the built-in publish command of npm. Any features supported by npm publish are available. For example, you may specify, on a per-project basis, which registry to deploy your package to by setting the publishConfig property in your project's package.json file.

Alternative registries may include on-premise solutions such as Artifactory and npm enterprise.

Security Disclosure Policy

To report a security vulnerability in this package, or one of it's dependencies, please use the Tidelift security contact page. Tidelift will coordinate the process to address the vulnerability and disclose the incident to our users.

Professional Support

Professional support for @hutson/npm-deploy-git-tag is available with a Tidelift Subscription.

Tidelift helps make open source sustainable for maintainers while giving companies assurances about security, maintenance, and licensing for their dependencies.

Debugging

To assist users of @hutson/npm-deploy-git-tag with debugging the behavior of this module we use the debug utility package to print information about the deploy process to the console. To enable debug message printing, the environment variable DEBUG, which is the variable used by the debug package, must be set to a value configured by the package containing the debug messages to be printed.

To print debug messages on a unix system set the environment variable DEBUG with the name of this package prior to executing @hutson/npm-deploy-git-tag:

DEBUG=npm-deploy-git-tag npm-deploy-git-tag

On the Windows command line you may do:

set DEBUG=npm-deploy-git-tag
npm-deploy-git-tag

Node Support Policy

We only support Long-Term Support versions of Node.

We specifically limit our support to LTS versions of Node, not because this package won't work on other versions, but because we have a limited amount of time, and supporting LTS offers the greatest return on that investment.

It's possible this package will work correctly on newer versions of Node. It may even be possible to use this package on older versions of Node, though that's more unlikely as we'll make every effort to take advantage of features available in the oldest LTS version we support.

As each Node LTS version reaches its end-of-life we will remove that version from the node engines property of our package's package.json file. Removing a Node version is considered a breaking change and will entail the publishing of a new major version of this package. We will not accept any requests to support an end-of-life version of Node. Any merge requests or issues supporting an end-of-life version of Node will be closed.

We will accept code that allows this package to run on newer, non-LTS, versions of Node. Furthermore, we will attempt to ensure our own changes work on the latest version of Node. To help in that commitment, our continuous integration setup runs against all LTS versions of Node in addition the most recent Node release; called current.

JavaScript package managers should allow you to install this package with any version of Node, with, at most, a warning if your version of Node does not fall within the range specified by our node engines property. If you encounter issues installing this package, please report the issue to your package manager.

Contributing

Please read our contributing guide to see how you may contribute to this project.