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Awais Abbas
Awais Abbas

Posted on • Updated on

Create and publish your own npm package with example

Creating the package

Create a new folder for the package. you can do that by typing in the terminal:

mkdir my_first_package



Then go inside the folder with terminal and initialize your package.json file like this:

cd my_first_package
npm init
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Fill in the required details about the package

You can skip some questions with Enter Key but try to provide the complete information.



Create a new file index.js in your directory and start writing your code.

In my case, I am creating a package to show console.log output in colors.

module.exports = function colorize(message, color) {
  switch (color) {
    case "red": {
      console.log("\x1b[31m%s\x1b[0m", `${message}`);
      break;
    }
    case "green": {
      console.log("\x1b[32m%s\x1b[0m", `${message}`);
      break;
    }
    case "blue": {
      console.log("\x1b[34m%s\x1b[0m", `${message}`);
      break;
    }
    case "black": {
      console.log("\x1b[30m%\x1b[1m%s\x1b[0m", `${message}`);
      break;
    }
    case "cyan": {
      console.log("\x1b[36m%s\x1b[0m", `${message}`);
      break;
    }
    default: {
      console.log(`${message}`);
    }
  }
};
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Here is some information about the above code:

  • A function is created named colorize that gets the console message and color of your choice as a parameter.
  • In Node, colors references of text to command are written like \x1b[30m for black color etc.
  • There is a %s present in each console to reset the color back to normal for other log outputs. (\x1b[0m is being used to reset the color).

publishing the package

  • Name your package inside the package.json file.
  • Go to npmjs website and create an account.
  • Now, open up the terminal in your project's directory and write following commands:
npm login
npm publish
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If you encounter an error after the publish command, change your package name to something unique as it already exists on NPM.

Now, lets test our package.

Install the package with:  
npm install colorixer

and in index.js file, write:

const colorixer = require("colorixer");

colorixer("My first NPM package", "red");
colorixer("My first NPM package", "green");
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Output:

output

And you are done..Thanks for reading :)

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