PackWeb

This is a collection of CLI tools designed to help with applications which are webs of interrelated NPM packages. Features currently include:

• show NPM owners for all packages and compare with lists of desired owners
• automatically bring NPM ownership into line with what is desired

Install:

npm install -g packweb

Use:

First of all we have to define a configuration file which specifies which NPM modules we're interested in performing all our operations on. This should be a JSON file with two keys: packages and owners. At the minimum, these are simple arrays of package names and NPM usernames, e.g.:

{
    "packages": ["foo", "bar", "baz"],
    "owners": ["alice", "bob", "charlotte"]
}

We can pass in this data to packweb as a command-line JSON string, a path to a JSON file, or a URL for a JSON file (say if you want to keep it in a GitHub repo). The simplest thing to do is simply --show ownership status:

packweb --show --config ./packweb.json

This will output a color-coded report that tells you how the ownership status of the packages in your list differs from what's desired. If you want, you can automatically update the ownership status (assuming you are yourself an owner of all the packages being managed by packweb):

packweb --update --config ./packweb.json

You might be thinking that your project is a bit more variegated: you have some packages which should have some owners, and some packages which should have all owners, and yet others which should have even a different set of owners. That's easy to do by making your packages and owners keys a hash of "groups" instead! Take a look at this example packweb.json:

{
    "packages": {
        "coredevs": ["foo", "bar"],
        "contractors": ["bar"],
        "admins": ["foo", "bar", "baz"]
    },
    "owners": {
        "coredevs": ["alice", "bob"],
        "contractors": ["charlotte"],
        "admins": ["doug", "erin"]
    }
}

You can get as complicated as you like with groups in this way. The only rule you have to follow is making sure the group names are the same for both packages and owners!

For a complicated packweb.json example, see Appium's packweb.json.

Hack on Packweb

# transpile and run tests on every change
gulp

# transpile and run tests once
gulp once