How to create your own Package executor

Having a node package for your introduction would be a cool way to flex your skills and also would help you to stand out amongst the crowd.

Creating and publishing your npm package is rather an easy task, however there are few prerequisites one needs to meet.

Prerequisites

• Have Node Installed
• npm account

Setting up the project

You can either fork and clone this repository, make the necessary changes and publish it (OR) Initialize the project, configure the necessary files, test locally, and publish it.

1. Clone this repository and make the necessary changes

If you're cloning this repository, there are only a few changes you'd need to make. Delete package.json and yarn.lock. Set up your remote origin pointing to the forked repository. Run npm init and enter the required details. After your package.json is generated. Add the below configuration properties to it:

  "bin": "./bin.js",
  "dependencies": {
    "yargs": "^17.7.2"
  },
  "publishConfig": {
    "access": "public"
  }

Run yarn install

Note: This project uses yarn. So make sure you've yarn installed.

Update data.js with your information, and to generate cool ASCII texts, you can use this website.

To test things locally, run npx . from the project directory.

Publishing

Publishing your package to npm is pretty straightforward, as there's a workflow already setup that publishes your changes when you commit your changes on the remote main branch. Before pushing your changes, you'd have to add your access token to your repository. You can obtain your access token from the npm website by clicking on your profile > access tokens > generate new token.

Add this token to your repository by navigating to your project > settings > secrets and variables(present on the left pane) > Actions > New repository secret > set the key as npm_token.

There you have it, run your package by executing npx <your-package-name>

2. Initialize the project from scratch

Get started by running npm init and enter the required details.

Once the package.json file is created, add the bin property and point it to your bin.js file.

Whenever the command npx <your-package-name> is executed, it is the bin file that runs. So, anything that'd you'd want to show on running the command should go into this file.

To support passing arguments and reading them, you may have to use a dependency like yargs.

Additionally, you can also add a workflow that publishes your package to the npm registry. You may refer to the workflow defined in this project by navigating to .github/workflows/npm-publish.yml.

Liked the project? Give it a :star:

Learned something new? Consider giving this repo a :star:. It would encourage me to publish more such cool projects. Thank you!