Pulling files from a directory into the root folder for NPM

Question

I am publishing a library to NPM.

When I build the library, the resulting artifact is placed in the dist folder located in the root of my project as index.js.

When users install from NPM I would like index.js to be present in the root of the folder created in their node_modules folder. Presently, it remains in a directory named dist.

How can I do this?

My packages.json:

{
  "name": "my-package",
  "version": "0.0.9",
  "files": ["dist/*"],
  "main": "index.min.js",
  "private": false,
  "dependencies": {},
  "devDependencies": {},
  "repository": "[email protected]:username/my-package.git"
}

Answer 1

I had exactly the same problem.

I solved it not by copying the files up, but by copying the files I needed down into the ./dist/ folder and then doing an npm publish from there; NPM then treats that folder as a complete package and everything works very nicely. The only files I needed to copy from the root folder were:

• package.json
• README.md

Because we're going to copy these files down into the ./dist/ folder before we do the publish, we do NOT want the package.json file to reference ./dist/. So remove the package.json's files entry completely, because we don't need to tell it which files we'll take - we're going to take everything in the ./dist/ folder. I'm using TypeScript so I also have a typings entry, and again no reference to ./dist/.

{
  "name": "my-package",
  "version": "0.0.9",
  "main": "index.min.js",
  "typings": "index.d.ts",
  "private": false,
  "dependencies": {},
  "devDependencies": {},
  "repository": "[email protected]:username/my-package.git"
}

Now for the publish step. I built a gulp task that will perform the publish for me, making it nice and automated (except for incrementing the package version #).

From gulp I'll use Node's spawn() to kick-off the npm process. However, because I'm actually working on Windows I used "cross-spawn" rather than the normal built-in Node.js spawn (which I learned the hard way didn't work when I had spaces in my path!).

Here's my gulp file, with the TypeScript bits removed:

var gulp = require('gulp');
var del = require('del');
var spawn =  require('cross-spawn'); // WAS: require('child_process').spawn;

var config = {
    src: { tsFiles: './src/**/*.ts' },
    out: { path: './dist/' }
}

gulp.task('clean', () => {
    return del('dist/*');
});


gulp.task('build', ['clean'], () => {
    ....
});


gulp.task('publish', ['build'], (done) => {
    // Copy the files we'll need to publish
    // We just use built-in gulp commands to do the copy
    gulp.src(['package.json', 'README.md']).pipe(gulp.dest(config.out.path));

    // We'll start the npm process in the dist directory
    var outPath = config.out.path.replace(/(\.)|(\/)/gm,'');
    var distDir = __dirname + '\\' + outPath + '\\';
    console.log("dist directory = " + distDir);

    // Start the npm process
    spawn('npm', ['publish'], { stdio:'inherit', cwd:distDir } )
        .on('close', done)
        .on('error', function(error) {
            console.error('  Underlying spawn error: ' + error);
            throw error;
        });
});

Notice when we call spawn() we pass in a 3rd argument which is the options. The main entry here is the cwd:distDir, which tells spawn to run the npm process from the ./dist/ directory. Because using spawn can cause problems I've hooked into the spawn error handling. As I was troubleshooting my use of spawn() I found the following StackOverflow article very helpful.

This worked like a charm; my published package has all the files in the root directory and the ./dist/ folder is not published.