Would love to have a 'dry run' flag for npm publish / pack

[aredridel]

It'd be nice when debugging .npmignore and .gitignore files to have a simple way to show what would be packed -- perhaps an npm pack -n or npm publish --dry-run that simply omits any of the output IO, and sets output to log the files packed.

[othiym23]

For now, you can use @thlorenz's irish-pub to see what will be packed by npm pack. You're right, it would be nice to get this integrated into npm itself. Want to take a stab at a PR? :D 👯

[thlorenz]

@aredridel you could just use the irish-pub code and put it behind a command in case you do a PR.
Probably wanna use npm lib functions instead of npm as a separate process in that case.

[timoxley]

uh, yet again I've built the same thing as you @thlorenz.

https://github.com/timoxley/pkgfiles

The approach there of grabbing stuff directly from fstream-npm rather than running it through the whole pack/unpack process might be closer to what should happen in npm itself.

[othiym23]

You're both pretty. 💏

The prettiest of all will be the one who turns this into a PR. npm publish --dry-run sounds good, but you should wait a day or two until I've slammed npmconf back into the mother ship (that sounds way more violent than I meant).

[timoxley]

also note --dry-run good flag choice, matches equivalent feature in git

[thlorenz]

Totally agree with @timoxley that his implementation is closer to what should be used.
Mine has a better name though :-P

[othiym23]

This is getting increasingly important as people run into more unexpected issues with publishing. Putting this on the "next minor version" milestone.

[aredridel]

I'm planning to spend a little work-sponsored time on it this week. Not a ton, but might be able to polish it off.

[glenjamin]

It'd be good if this also explicitly stated which registry URL it is publishing to.

Every time I publish a private module I have a slight hand-in-mouth moment when I wonder if i've got the right config set.

[jayphelps]

Ever since publish -f went away, this missing has caused me to have to literally create throw away package registrations so I can "test" configurations, particularly complex .npmignore scenarios.

[jayphelps]

Tip: you can work around this by trying to publish using an npm user who is not authorized to publish. It will build the tarball and everything, just not publish. You can then untar it and see what would have published. For OSX, it will be localed /Users/your-username/.npm/your-project/X.y.z/package.tgz (you can find the path in your npm-debug.log) See below

[glenjamin]

@jayphelps npm pack will build the tarball without publishing - does that not suit your use-case there?

[jayphelps]

@glenjamin yep.....if only I had RTFM....

[hemanth]

tar -tf $(npm pack)

[othiym23]

@iarna did this for npm@3! She'll be by anon to explain what its deal is.

[iarna]

Aaaactually, no, I added --dry-run for stuff that effects node_modules and your package.json but these are actually untouched.

[TimFerrell]

@iarna 😓

[othiym23]

The CLI team still intends to see this functionality added as npm publish --dry-run (and / or npm pack --dry-run), probably using a listener to fstream-npm plus lib/utils/tar.js as described by @timoxley. It would indeed be nice to also include metadata related to the publish, such as the packed package size, the registry to which it would be published, and the user who would be doing the publishing (for optimal offline use, it probably shouldn't actually do any permissions checks against the registry, or at least should downgrade gracefully if the registry isn't available). This seems like something that would be an excellent and reasonably self-contained feature for a contributor not on the CLI team to do, so I've labeled the issue accordingly. Thanks to all for their contributions and patience thus far!

[legodude17]

Can I try taking a crack at this?

[brody4hire]

I think there is a bug: I did npm publish --dry-run thinking it would either do a dry run or fail with an error, but it went ahead and published my work! I am using node 6.9.1 with nvm on my macOS system and npm --version returns 3.10.8.

[kenany]

@brodybits This functionality has not yet been implemented.

[npm-robot]

We're closing this issue as it has gone thirty days without activity. In our experience if an issue has gone thirty days without any activity then it's unlikely to be addressed. In the case of bug reports, often the underlying issue will be addressed but finding related issues is quite difficult and often incomplete.

If this was a bug report and it is still relevant then we encourage you to open it again as a new issue. If this was a feature request then you should feel free to open it again, or even better open a PR.

For more information about our new issue aging policies and why we've instituted them please see our blog post.

[winniehell]

@othiym23 This was closed automatically—any chance to get it reopened?

[rodoabad]

Voting to get opened!

[glebsts]

please vote for #19308

[zkat]

#19908 ;)