How to build and publish your npm package.

The first step of creating npm will be creating a git repository on github.

So this empty repository was created:

https://github.com/webgirlkristina/sleepjs.git

Now we can download our repository.

git clone https://github.com/webgirlkristina/sleepjs.git webgirlkristina-sleep
cd webgirlkristina-sleep

Create file .gitignore

node_modules/

Now we can start our npm project.

npm init -y

Let's open and edit the config file package.json.

The git repository was already there, we only added description and changed the file name to - sleep.js

{
  "name": "webgirlkristina-sleep",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "sleep function for JavaScript",
  "main": "sleep.js",
  "scripts": {
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
  },
  "repository": {
    "type": "git",
    "url": "git+https://github.com/webgirlkristina/sleepjs.git"
  },
  "keywords": [],
  "author": "",
  "license": "ISC",
  "bugs": {
    "url": "https://github.com/webgirlkristina/sleepjs/issues"
  },
  "homepage": "https://github.com/webgirlkristina/sleepjs#readme"
}

Now we can build our JavaScript package. For this example, we build a JS function similar to PHP function sleep.

File - sleep.js

const sleep = (sec) => new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(resolve, sec * 1000));
module.exports = sleep;

In order to let other people use our package, we need to create instructions. Let's edit file README.md

# Sleep
Function `sleep` for JavaScript. 
>sleep(seconds) -> Promise
## Installation

    npm i webgirlkristina-sleep

## Usage

```js
const sleep = require('webgirlkristina-sleep');
const test = async () => {
	console.log('text1');
	await sleep(2); //sleep for 2 seconds
	console.log('text2');
};
test();
```

This is the Markdown format and on github this looks like:

Now we can push our package to GitHub, but first let's check git user.

git config user.name

We can set user data for git this way:

git config --global user.name "webgirlkristina"
git config --global user.email "webgirlkristina@gmail.com"

And our first commit.

git add .
git commit -m "first"

Don't forget to add the package version.

git tag -a v1.0 -m "the first version"

Everything is ready to push on GitHub

git push --follow-tags

Now we can publish our package on npmjs.com. But first we need to login npm login. You can check current login: npm whoami.

And finally:

npm publish

Now our package is available to anybody.

To test our new package we create a new NPM project. And install our package:

npm i webgirlkristina-sleep

Our test script:

const sleep = require('webgirlkristina-sleep');

const test = async () => {
	console.log('text1');
	await sleep(2); //sleep for 2 seconds
	console.log('text2');
};
test();

That's it, our package working.

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