Publishing a Plugin to NPM

Share your work with the world 🌎

If you don't have anything secret contained in your plugin, you are encouraged to publish it as a package to NPM and share it with the world 🏆.

Let's walk through how to do that together:

Make an npm account

If you haven't yet, follow these short steps to create an npm account. You will need to come up with a username, email, and password!

Create the package boilerplate

As noted in our docs on The Simplest Plugin, if you've never set up a TS/node package before, we greatly recommend using aqu!

pnpm

yarn dlx aqu create learn-card-example-plugin

? Pick package manager: yarn
? Specify package description: () # Describe your plugin!
? Package author: # Who are you?
? Git repository (only for package.json information): 
? Pick license: MIT # See https://choosealicense.com/
? Pick template: typescript

cd learn-card-example-plugin

yarn

pnpm dlx aqu create learn-card-example-plugin

? Pick package manager: pnpm
? Specify package description: () # Describe your plugin!
? Package author: # Who are you?
? Git repository (only for package.json information): 
? Pick license: MIT # See https://choosealicense.com/
? Pick template: typescript

cd learn-card-example-plugin

npm

npx aqu create learn-card-example-plugin

? Pick package manager: npm
? Specify package description: () # Describe your plugin!
? Package author: # Who are you?
? Git repository (only for package.json information): 
? Pick license: MIT # See https://choosealicense.com/
? Pick template: typescript

cd learn-card-example-plugin

Create a Github Repo

If you've selected an open source license (such as MIT or ISC), please make a Github Repo containing the code to your plugin! If you've never done this before, we recommend using the Github CLI.

First, create a Github Account, then install and login with the CLI. This is usually done with the following command:

gh auth login

After getting all setup, initialize and create the repo with the following commands:

git init

echo "node_modules/" >> .gitignore
echo "dist/" >> .gitignore

git add .
git commit -m "Initial Commit"

gh repo create
? What would you like to do? Push an existing local repository to GitHub
? Path to local repository .
? Repository name learn-card-example-plugin
? Description Example LearnCard Plugin!
? Visibility Public
✓ Created repository {REPOSITORY_NAME} on GitHub
? Add a remote? Yes
? What should the new remote be called? origin
✓ Added remote {REPOSITORY_URL}
? Would you like to push commits from the current branch to "origin"? Yes
✓ Pushed commits to {REPOSITORY_URL}

After getting a repo up, it's a good idea to add the URL (shown above as {REPOSITORY_URL}) to the package.json!

package.json

  "repository": {
    "type": "git",
    "url": {REPOSITORY_URL}
  },

Release the Package

With everything set up, you may run the release command!

pnpm

pnpm release

yarn

yarn release

npm

npm run release

If you didn't use aqu to create your package, you may need to use the publish command directly:

pnpm

pnpm publish

yarn

yarn publish

npm

npm publish

Congratulations! 🥳 Your plugin is officially published and others may use it by installing it from npm!