npm login credentials on the CI server

Update: This post is now available at a new location:
https://blog.ngeor.com/2017/01/28/npm-login-credentials-on-the-ci-server.html

In a previous post, I was discussing a way to publish an npm package to the public npm registry. A big prerequisite for that to work is that you have previously logged in to the CI server in order to authenticate against npm. But we can also fix that manual step and integrate it in the build.

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Automatic versioning of npm packages

Update: This post is now available at a new location:
https://blog.ngeor.com/2016/08/20/automatic-versioning-of-npm-packages.html

When you are the maintainer of an npm package, you need to do some administrative work around its versioning. When you release a new version, you need to make sure the package.json is updated, the package is correctly uploaded to npm registry, the git repository is tagged accordingly and so on. You shouldn’t be doing these things manually if you can automate them.

On the left-pad drama

Update: This post is now available at a new location:
https://blog.ngeor.com/2016/03/26/on-the-left-pad-drama.html

This week the internet exploded in drama after 11 lines of code got unpublished from npm. If you didn’t read about it, the summary is that the developer of left-pad removed his package from npm, after npm renamed another package of his because of some name conflict with some other company’s trademark or so. Lots of other packages broke because of this due to the missing dependency. What is interesting here, is that this removed left-pad package consists of a single function (only 11 lines of code). How can that tiny package break the internet?