tag-dist-files

Tag distribution files without messing up your git history - sort of fixes bower - awesome for publishing js libraries

Publishing javascript libraries to bower can be very difficult. Bower expects that distribution files (babelified & uglified & webpackyfied & blubberyfied, .. whatever we do these days..) exist in the tagged commits. At least our users expect that. But having distribution files in the commit history sucks. This is why some projects [e.g. quill] don't even publish distribution files in the tagged commits. This sucks for the user - not everyone wants to use 99 transpilation tools. Other projects (e.g. ace) have a dedicated project for publishing distribution files. This sucks for the developer. I think this approach sucks less.

What it does

We use a nifty trick to tag distribution files without messing up our commit history:

• git checkout --detach We detach the head. This means we no longer track any branch
• git add -f files We force to add all distribution files specified in package.json's files attribute
• git commit -am 'Publish vX.Y.Z -- with dist files' Commit dist files. vX.Y.Z is given by package.json's version attribute
• git tag vX.Y.Z Tag release with dist files
• git push origin vX.Y.Z Push tag
• git checkout master Revert to tracking master branch (dist files are no longer tracked / in the git history)

Checklist

This tool is for you if..

• You have a package.json.
• You understand what it does
• You work in a unix-ish environment (Linux | Mac (untested) | Windows with Cygwin (untested))

Tutorial

$ npm i -g tag-dist-files
$ tag-dist-files

This tool works really well with npm publish (or even better: np).

..
  "scripts": {
    ..
    "postversion": "npm run dist",
    "postpublish": "tag-dist-files --overwrite-existing-tag"
  }

Then you can just run np. The difference is that all files specified in package.json's files attribute are added to your tagged commit. Therefore, bower i your-package installs distribution files too!