NPM publish flatten

Publish npm packages with flattened source directory

Description

If you ever been annoyed by imports like the one below then this is the tool for you.

import styles from "project/dist/styles"

It does the following:

1. Runs npm pack --dry-run to get a list of all files to publish
2. Copies all files to temporary directory .npmPublishFlatten with flattened paths
3. Updates package.json to correspond to the flattened structure
4. Strips fields from package.json (optional)
5. Publishes the content of the temporary directory to npm (optional)
6. Removes temporary directory (optional)

Installation

npm install publish-flatten --save

Usage

node node_modules/publish-flatten --flatten dist
In below examples I'm going to omit the node_modules/ path for cleaner code.

Default npm publish

Published directory structure

$ npm publish
.
├── package.json
├── README.md
└──  dist
    ├── index.js
    ├── index.js.map
    └── sub
        ├── util.js
        └── util.js.map

Import code

import project from "project/dist"
import util from "project/dist/sub/util"

publish-flatten

Multiple directories and sub directories can be flattened.

Published directory structure

$ node publish-flatten --flatten dist --flatten dist/sub
.
├── package.json
├── README.md
├── index.js
├── index.js.map
├── util.js
└── util.js.map  

Import code

import project from "project"
import util from "project/util"

Strip fields from package.json

Sometimes you have information in your package.json that you don't want to publish. These can be stripped using the --strip argument.

Removes scripts and devDependencies from package.json before publishing.
node publish-flatten --strip scripts --strip devDependencies

CLI arguments

 --flatten      Directory to be flattened. Can be repeated for additional directories.
 --strip        Field in package.json to strip/remove. Can be repeated for additional fields.
 --keepResult   Keep temporary directory with the published files.

Additional arguments

All additional arguments are passed on to the underlying npm publish process. This means that you can still pass arguments to npm publish.

Parameter --dry-run is passed on to npm publish.
node publish-flatten --flatten dist --dry-run

Create npm script

An easy way to always get your build with correct flattened dirs is to create an script in package.json.

{
    "scripts": {
        "pub": "node node_modules/publish-flatten --flatten dist --strip scripts"
    }
}

This can then be called by: npm run pub
Or with additional arguments: npm run pub -- --dry-run