How to automate NPM deployment with GitHub action hooks

One of my biggest annoyances with managing open source projects is publishing to NPM.

I manage dozens of projects. Running npm publish after releasing a new version seems like a little thing, but after updating the package.json file, running a fresh build, testing everything, updating docs, and commenting on open issues, it’s one more detail to mentally worry about.

I always forget to do it, which results in another open issue about NPM not having the latest version. As a result, I just stopped supporting NPM for a while.

Here’s where automation can be a huge help!

GitHub Actions

GitHub recently released a new feature, Actions, that let’s you automate things whenever you push to GitHub.

Note: at the time of writing, it’s currently in Beta, so you’ll need to sign up for the wait list. It took me a couple of months to get access.

The reason I was personally so excited about this was that it provides a way to automatically push new releases to NPM.

I could finally offer this feature again for people who use my stuff, without the mental overhead that caused me so many issues before.

Setting up NPM deploy automation

First up, if you don’t have an NPM account, you’ll need to create one.

Log in to your account, then click on your face and select Tokens from the dropdown menu. Once there, click Create New Token.

Now head over to the GitHub repository you want to automate. Click Settings, then Secrets. Click the Add a new secret link.

Use NPM_AUTH_TOKEN for the name, and paste in your NPM token for the value. GitHub stores these hashed on their servers does not display them or make them accessible anywhere else.

Prepping your repository

In the actual repository files for your project, first make sure that you have a package.json file.

Double check that the name property matches the project name on NPM (or is available if this will be your first time publishing it), and that there’s a proper version property, too.

If your project files don’t already include a .github directory (with leading dot), create one. Inside it, create a file called main.workflow.

Open up the file, and copy/paste this into it. Don’t forget to save!

workflow "publish on release" {
  on = "push"
  resolves = ["publish"]
}

action "publish" {
  uses = "actions/npm@master"
  args = "publish"
  secrets = ["NPM_AUTH_TOKEN"]
}

Deploying to NPM

Now you’re ready to put your GitHub action into, well, action.

Commit your changes and push them up to GitHub.

If the version in your package.json differs from what’s on NPM, it will publish a new version. Otherwise, it will bail and do nothing.

This will run every time you publish to the master branch.