Sunday, July 10, 2016

PluginPub - Publish your PhoneGap plugins to NPM

I was inspired by Sindre Sorhus package np which makes publishing a package to npm easy by running the following tasks automatically for you:


  • Ensures you are publishing from the master branch
  • Ensures the working directory is clean and that there are no unpulled changes
  • Reinstalls dependencies to ensure your project works with the latest dependency tree
  • Runs the tests
  • Bumps the version in package.json and npm-shrinkwrap.json (if present) and creates a git tag
  • Publishes the new version to npm, optionally under a dist-tag
  • Pushes commits and tags to GitHub
Now I'm in favour of anything that makes my life easier so I decided to take np and enhance it with some tasks I routinely do when publishing new plugins. My first pass at it is a new package called pluginpub which is a copy of np that I eventually hope to change to depend on np instead. 

The main difference is that it:

  • Bumps the version in plugin.xml, package.json and npm-shrinkwrap.json (if present) and creates a git tag
It now automates a lot of stuff I used to do manually into a single command. Installation is simple, you run:

npm install pluginpub --save-dev
In the root of your plugin repo. Then to release a new version of the plugin you would execute the command from the root of your plugin repo:

pluginpub 1.5.8
The command takes only one argument and that is the version of the plugin. If you don't pass in a valid semver then the command will fail.

Anyway, it make or may not be of use to you. Feel free to try it out and report any issues on the github page. Next steps are publishing a proper README and adding the auto-generation of a CHANGELOG file which is another manual step I hate doing when releasing a plugin.

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