Publishing from "dist" and missing package.json

[semantic-release]

Publishing from "dist" and missing package.json

[iangregsondev]

Hi, ok thanks I will try that. I did that previously because i wanted a cleaner import - so i am able to do the following.

(i dont export every file to the root index.js)

import { MyData } from "@MyComp/MyPackage/data

publishing the dist folder - even with the main "dist/index.js" means that if i wanted to do the above then i would need to do

import { MyData } from "@MyComp/MyPackage/dist/data

notice the dist in the import ?

Maybe i should just export everything inside of the dist/index.js

so i can do a cleaner import, before I stopped exporting everything in the root index.js as it was getting real messy BUT of course now I have the ability to use microservices etc...

[pvdlg]

Why are you trying to publish from dist? Shouldn't you publish the dist directory from the root of your project?

Typically a project with compiled files would have the following in the package.json:

{
  "files": ["dist/**"],
  "main": "dist/index.js"
}

And publish from the root of the project.

In your situation publishing from dist would make things a lot complex and risky. You would have to copy every files that need to be included in the package into dist. That includes .npmignore, .gitignore, README.md, CHANGELOG.md, LICENSE, maybe some documentation and potentially many other files. That's risky because if you add a new file in your project it would be really easy to forget to copy and publish a release without it.

[soymikey]

That happened to me as well, so i work around with configure package.json file. My configuration: "bin": { "cli": "dist/bin/cli.js" }

[iangregsondev]

I hope I am attempting this correctly? Basically, I would like to publish to NPM only the DIST directory as this is where all my compiled files are.

[pvdlg]

What is typically done in node modules is to have an index.js that exposes the public parts of your API (the stuff that you can require from other modules).

Something like that:

module.exports = {someFunction, SomeClass, someOtherFunction};

Those thing you export in index.js can come from anywhere internally in your project.

[iangregsondev]

Thanks, yes I am going to return to this way of doing things, I think i changed for all the wrong reasons. Now I am using nestjs - its got way more structure and I am able to abstract a lot of the stuff I am doing right now - into microservices.

So it seems a good time to do it.

Thanks again

[ryanrosello-og]

I ran into this problem just now, took me a little while to figure it out. My problem was trying to be fancy and importing the package.json to scrape the name and version of the package.

fixed by removing it for now: