Are there npm version prerelease identifiers?

Question

There is a very handy npm version command. Besides arguments like major, minor and patch it accepts arguments like prerelease, prepatch, etc.
It says in the docs that the commands work in accordance with the semver.inc function.

These pre commands I have a question about.

Say I'm currently at version v1.0.0.
If I run npm version prerelease it will bump version to v1.0.1-0.

Is it possible to provide an extra agrument for a prerelease identifier according to https://github.com/npm/node-semver#prerelease-identifiers?

I wish something like npm version prerelease alpha would bump version to v1.0.1-alpha.0 but that doesn't work.

Answer 1

Starting with npm 6.4.0 you can use the --preid option of npm version like this:

$ npm version prerelease --preid=alpha v0.1.1-alpha.0 $ npm version prerelease --preid=alpha v0.1.1-alpha.1 $ npm version prerelease --preid=alpha v0.1.1-alpha.2 

Answer 2

Like the other answer mentioned this is not supported by npm because of the reason mentioned in this comment

But you can achieve the same using semver package and npm scripts by adding something like the following to the package.json

"scripts": {   "beta-version-patch": "npm version $(semver $npm_package_version -i prerelease --preid beta)",   "beta-version-minor": "npm version $(semver $npm_package_version -i preminor --preid beta)",   "beta-version-major": "npm version $(semver $npm_package_version -i premajor --preid beta)",   "rc-version": "npm version $(semver $npm_package_version -i prerelease --preid rc)",   "final-release": "npm version $(semver $npm_package_version -i)" } 

and run npm run beta-version-patch

To be more generic you can use the following:

"scripts": {   "semver": "npm version $(semver $npm_package_version -i $release --preid $preid)" } 

and run commands like:

release=prerelease preid=alpha npm run semver release=prerelease preid=beta npm run semver release=premajor preid=alpha npm run semver