Update a NPM package version

Back from holidays and very little time to write a post!

Let’s have a quick look at updating a NPM package version in a clean and easy way. Well, it’s not that hard anyway.

Prerequisites

• In your package.json make sure you have a prepublish command that will be run when you do the final npm run publish. Usually this command runs a build of the package in production mode.

• I’ll consider you are already hooked up with NPM website. If not see: https://docs.npmjs.com/getting-started/publishing-npm-packages#creating-a-user

• I will also consider that all the package information about your package are present into package.json. They should be if it’s a version update anyway :)

Let’s update!

• Open your terminal and go to your package root folder.

• Make your changes on code base.

• Once you are sure everything is fine, npm version patch (will bump third number, i.e. 0.1.5 -> 0.1.6) or any other more appropriate argument (see https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/version)

• Run git push origin master --tags.

npm version also creates a tag. So we need to push the tags in order to have the version available in Github too.

• Run npm publish

• Check your package on http://www.npmjs.com it should have been updated!

PS: You are more than a thousand to visit my blog/articles every months. Thanks a lot! This is super motivating and hope it helps you :)