Publish your first package on npm!

Introduction

This week we are asked to release our work by choosing a release method. To make our work, I decided to release my very first package on NPM. You can also check it out at here.

Why NPM?

There are several reasons why I decided to choose NPM as my release method. Firstly, NPM is super popular to the developers all around the world. Therefore, publishing my package on the site would be a good idea. Moreover, since all of the dependencies used in my projects are published on NPM, it gives me a solid reason to go with NPM

How?

To publish my first ever package on NPM, these are the steps that I took at the time:

• You need to create an account on npm first.

• After creating your first account, navigate to the root folder of your project. At the terminal, use this command to login:
  

npm login

• Next, create a package.json file in your folder.

npm init

You can change the name and the version of your package inside your package.json file. Below is what I did in my file:

{
  "name": "link-checker-tool",
  "version": "1.0.2",
  "description": "A tool used to check whether an URL is available or not",
  "bin": {
    "lct": "/link-checker.js"
  },
  "keywords": [
    "cli"
  ],
  "scripts": {
    ...
  },
  "preferGlobal": true,
  "author": "Thanh Tien Phat Nguyen",
  "license": "ISC",
  "dependencies": {
    ...
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    ...
  }
}

• To make it easy for other people understand how to use your package, update your README.md document which allows users to have some basic knowledge about your package. Below is a piece of my README.md, you can check the full version at here.

• Lastly, publish your package by using this command:

npm publish

If you get the message below, your package is published successfully.

How to use my package?

My package this is an CLI that checks if a url is available. Some of the features that I have added to this package is:

• Check and print all the good, bad and unknown links in a file.
• Read multiple files at once.
• Check the availability of an URL.
• Give the URL to an archived version of a website.
• Output JSON format of a URL entered.

To install my package, please use the command

npm install link-checker-tool

npm install -g link-checker-tool

For more usages of my package, you can read my whole document for more information.

What I learn from this week lab

• How to release a package
• How to improve the workflow by tagging my release.