npm publish and tag releases

[theoludwig]

Hey 👋,

To automate the deployment of my npm packages, I use GitHub Actions that triggers everytime we create a release/tag on GitHub, this action use npm publish --access public command.
I also wanted to automate the deployment of the standard package, so I opened a PR to implement this : standard/standard#1634

But currenly we are only releasing with latest tag, how does it it work if we want to release on a beta tag for example ?

I thought you only needed to change the version number in package.json so it can release on another tag, but as it is in the doc, we also need to run npm publish --tag=beta for example, it doesn't automatically, release on the tag specified in the version number inside package.json.

In my opinion, it should be the case, I ran npm publish --dry-run and here is what I've got :

I don't know what means standard@16.0.3-beta1, is it still released under latest tag with this version number or effectively release with beta tag ?
(I only updated package.json version number to 16.0.3-beta1, nothing else)

Thanks for your answer and your help! 😄

[arcanis]

I don't know what means standard@16.0.3-beta1, is it still released under latest tag with this version number or effectively release with beta tag ?

Versions numbers have no direct connection with dist-tags, so you can have a beta tag with stable versions, and latest with beta qualifiers.

As a quick tip, avoid using beta1 as beta qualifier, prefer using beta.1. If you don't you'll hit issues if you ever need to release a bunch of betas (because as per semver, beta10 < beta2 due to lexicographic sort).

[theoludwig]

Oh right, also thanks for your tip, we'll use standard@16.0.3-beta.1 instead of the beta1 one.

Versions numbers have no direct connection with dist-tags

But shouldn't be the case ? In my opinion it feels weird to have a version release to latest tag with the number version as beta, don't you think ?

What are the use cases to have the version 16.0.3-beta.1 released under latest tag ?
Souldn't be by default release to beta tag ? It certainly need a little bit more code CLI part since we need to parse the version number and to see if there is a tag name. Is yarn working same way as npm to release packages ?

I don't see any use case to this :

so you can have a beta tag with stable versions, and latest with beta qualifiers.

[arcanis]

Is yarn working same way as npm to release packages ?

I think we do (we don't change the target tag based on the version), but if you want to open an issue on our repo it's probably something we can discuss for the next major.

[theoludwig]

Issue available there : yarnpkg/berry#2444
Also it would be cool that JavaScipt package manager follow each other the features, so if we implement this on yarn, we should also consider it for npm and pnpm cli tools.

[MylesBorins]

At this time we still require the use of the --tag argument to set the specific dist-tag and don't assume anything based on the semver. To be honest I think it might be too fragile to do anything else. It might be worth kicking off an issue over at https://github.com/npm/rfcs if you want to propose a larger change to how this works with publish.

[theoludwig]

Thanks for your answer!
RFC open there : npm/rfcs#317