Publish npm packages using CircleCI

The right CI/CD setup and workflow for publishing npm packages using CirclerCi

Photo by Milad B. Fakurian

Introduction

You can always publish your npm packages manually on your local machine but what if you want to make a CI/CD process for it? This question introduces lots of other questions like how to manage branches or versioning, how to manage staging and production releases. In this article, we will explore a simple base process that you can extend based on your project preferences. A base that includes primary blocks for the right CI/CD process.

Publish has some side effects:

• Versioning
• Different stages/environment release
• Keep track of release

What we need is a workflow that supports team and project requirements. There are two well-known workflows that influenced the software development community. Github-Flow and Git-Flow, what we are going to use is Github-Flow but there is a good article that discusses the differences between the two.

Github Flow

The master branch in Github-Flow is always ready for production release and releases happen regularly and branches are lightweight.

Github Flow

• create a branch for a feature or a bug fix
• add commits
• open pull request
• discuss & review
• merge & deploy

Publish Workflow

Here are rules for our process based on Github Flow:

• Only run tests and build process for open pull requests
• The merge is available only if tests are passed and the build is successful
• Other branches will skip the CI/CD workflow
• Any commit or merge to master branch triggers the release process
• Changes can apply to master only through a pull request and it’s protected
• Use npm publish patch to increase the patch…