Preview package files and validate against package.json
Closed this issue · 6 comments
Hello,
my most frequent problem in publishing, being an npm noob, is the absence of a file in dist/ when the project is being packaged. (often due to the subtle differences between npm and yarn...)
As a result all the checks are green, but once the published package is npm-installed a file is missing and everything explodes.
Have someone ever experienced the same?
Could this tool solve that issue, maybe by checking package.json files fields and .npmignore, and making sure all needed files exists?
Could it be a feature you're interested in?
Hi @caesarsol
Your issue looks interesting and familiar, but I haven't completely understood your pain point.
If your problem is that some of the files builded in /dist are missing from your whitelist files, you could simply add the whole folder to the whitelist as follows:
"files": [
"dist"
]Would this fix that precise problem or not?
Yeah, that is the solution, but I realize it only after publishing a non-working version... 😄
Plus, there are small differences in .npmignore and .yarnignore that could give more problems.
Yeah, we are completely ignoring .yarnignore in our validation and that is definitely a defect we should solve!
The problem with the rest is that I'm afraid it's impossible for a script to be 100% sure that every file you need is inside files (or outside of .npmignore) as first it would have to know which are the files you do need :)
We can consider adding an optional step to make a dry-run of npm publish so to let the user review the soon-to-be-published package content before continuing.
What I was thinking is to run npm pack and then list all the tar-packed files, for visual validation by the user.
Do you think it could be useful?
Yes, that sounds very useful, we should try with that approach first! 💯
👍 I'll take a look at the code in the next days!