How to Write an Open Source JavaScript Library - memorandum

This is a memorandum of the evergreen Kent C. Dodds course about How to Write an Open Source JavaScript Library available for free on Egghead. I didn't annotated everything that has been treated in the course. Instead, I annotated just the things that I need to remember compared to what I'd already consolidated 😉

• Add the author and license information

npm set-init-author-name 'Stefano Magni'
npm init-author-email 'nori.ste.magni@gmail.com'
npm init-author-url 'https://github.com/NoriSte'
npm set init-license 'MIT'

• Save the exact version of the dependencies you install to protect your package from future upgrades of the dependencies themselves. You can do that with

npm install [package] --save-exact
# or with Yarn
yarn add [package] --exact

• Use npm info [package] to avoid opening the NPM site to check if everything is been published correctly

• To publish a beta version of our package:

  • change the package.json version to x.y.x-beta.0
  • npm publish --tag beta
  • and now you can install run

  npm install [package]
  npm install [package]@beta
  # and, if you have added a tag on GitHub, you can install the specific tag too
  npm install [package]@x.y.x-beta.0
  

• Install locally commitizen and cz-conventional-changelog
  p.s. Checking on the commitizen site the new way to install them is the following

npx commitizen init cz-conventional-changelog --save-dev --save-exact

And you can then add some nice npm run scripts in your package.json pointing to the local version of commitizen (if you aren't using husky and precommit):

"scripts": {
  "commit": "npx git-cz"
}

And you can add the Citizen badge too

[![Commitizen friendly](https://img.shields.io/badge/commitizen-friendly-brightgreen.svg)](http://commitizen.github.io/cz-cli/)

Take a look at the whole conventionalcommits specs to learn more about it.

Last but not least:

• take a look at the standard-version library
• You can find a long list of badges on shields.io