A 5-Year-Old Could Follow This TypeScript SDK Development Guide ~ Part 4: Publishing to NPM | HackerNoon

Helloooooooo!

Hope you’re doing great! This is SMY! 👋 Let’s jump right in 🚀

This is Part 4 of our SDK development series where we will publish our SDK

Contents:

• ⚡ Creating an NPM account
• ⚡ Publishing to NPM, semantic versioning, and LICENSE

Step 1: Creating an NPM Account

Head over to https://www.npmjs.com, and create an account.

Step 2: Publish

In the terminal, write:

npm login

After following the login steps, write:

npm publish

This can fail due to duplicate package names or wrong configuration in package.json

Your package.json should look like the following:

{
  "name": "ts-lib-template-starter",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "SDK development tutorial",
  "main": "./src/index.ts",
  "scripts": {
    "test": "echo "Error: no test specified" && exit 1",
    "build": "tsup ./src/index.ts --watch"
  },
  "type": "module",
  "keywords": [],
  "author": "",
  "license": "ISC",
  "devDependencies": {
    "@types/node": "^20.14.8",
    "tsup": "^8.1.0",
    "typescript": "^5.5.2"
  }
}

Congrats; you just published your first SDK to NPM 🎉🥳 🚀🚀🚀

Step 3: Semantic Versioning

When publishing a library, it is good to keep versioning in check. Versioning helps the developer integrate the code to get an idea of what update happened to the SDK. Furthermore, the right versioning will help package managers to update to the level as it is mentioned in their package.json.

To help developers who rely on your code, we recommend starting your package version at 1.0.0 and incrementing as follows:

Learn more about semantic versioning here: https://docs.npmjs.com/about-semantic-versioning

Step 4: LICENSE

Specify a license for your package so that people know how they are permitted to use it, and any restrictions you’re placing on it.

source: https://snyk.io/learn/open-source-licenses/

For example, this SDK is open for distribution and modifying the code so I would use MIT as LICENSE.

In package.json

  "license": "MIT"

Learn more about various types of LICENCES here: https://snyk.io/learn/open-source-licenses/

Wrapping Up:

We Just completed the steps to publish our SDK. Head over to Part 5 where we will make a CDN for browsers 🚀

…..

Now, you’re equipped with the knowledge to publish your own SDK. Happy coding! 🚀

That’s it, folks! hope it was a good read for you. Thank you! ✨

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