Automating npm Package Publication with GitHub Actions

Introduction

Recently, I’ve been developing several npm packages for personal projects. It was becoming a hassle to build and run npm publish locally every time I needed to release a new version.

So, I automated the publication process using GitHub Actions and I’m summarizing the steps here.

Procedure

Creating an npm Access Token

First, click on your npm account icon and navigate through the menu: Access Tokens > Generate New Token > Granular Access Token to reach the token creation page.

Set the permissions in Packages and scopes to Read and Write, fill in the remaining fields, and create the token.

Setting up GitHub Actions

Next, go to your GitHub repository’s settings, navigate through Secrets and variables > Actions > Repository secrets, and set up a secret using the npm access token you just created. Let’s name the secret NPM_ACCESS_TOKEN. This makes the access token available in the workflow as ${{ secrets.NPM_ACCESS_TOKEN }}.

Then, create a workflow file. In the example below, the trigger is set for tag pushes, but feel free to modify it as you like.

name: Release

on:
  push:
    tags:
      - '*'

jobs:
  release:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Setup node
        uses: actions/setup-node@v4
        with:
          node-version: '20.x'
          registry-url: 'https://registry.npmjs.org'
      - name: Install npm packages
        run: npm ci
      - name: build
        run: npm run build
      - name: Publish to npm 
        run: npm publish --access public
        env:
          NODE_AUTH_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.NPM_ACCESS_TOKEN }}

Points to note:

• The environment variable name to pass during npm publish is NODE_AUTH_TOKEN
• If you’re publishing a public package, use npm publish --access public
• In the setup-node step, it’s necessary to set the registry-url to https://registry.npmjs.org/

The complete workflow is available in the following repository, feel free to use it as a reference. It also includes the process for creating release notes.

gatsby-plugin-satorare/.github/workflows/release.yml at main · okaryo/gatsby-plugin-satorare

Gatsby plugin for dynamic OG image generation in JSX - okaryo/gatsby-plugin-satorare

github.com

Conclusion

It’s truly convenient how easy it is to set up GitHub Actions, thanks to the well-organized documentation.

Glad to eliminate one more redundant task from the world.

References

Publishing Node.js packages - GitHub Docs

You can publish Node.js packages to a registry as part of your continuous integration (CI) workflow.

docs.github.com