Creating and publishing unscoped public packages

As an npm user, you can create unscoped packages to use in your own projects and publish them to the npm public registry for others to use in theirs. Unscoped packages are always public and are referred to by the package name only:

For more information on package scope, access, and visibility, see "Package scope, access level, and visibility".

Creating an unscoped public package

1. On the command line, create a directory for your package:

   mkdir my-test-package

2. Navigate to the root directory of your package:

   cd my-test-package

3. If you are using git to manage your package code, in the package root directory, run the following commands, replacing git-remote-url with the git remote URL for your package:

   git init
   git remote add origin git://git-remote-url

4. In the package root directory, run the npm init command.

5. Respond to the prompts to generate a package.json file. For help naming your package, see "Package name guidelines".

6. Create a README file that explains what your package code is and how to use it.

7. In your preferred text editor, write the code for your package.

Reviewing package contents for sensitive or unnecessary information

Publishing sensitive information to the registry can harm your users, compromise your development infrastructure, be expensive to fix, and put you at risk of legal action. We strongly recommend removing sensitive information, such as private keys, passwords, personally identifiable information (PII), and credit card data before publishing your package to the registry.

For less sensitive information, such as testing data, use a .npmignore or .gitignore file to prevent publishing to the registry. For more information, see this article.

Testing your package

To reduce the chances of publishing bugs, we recommend testing your package before publishing it to the npm registry. To test your package, run npm install with the full path to your package directory:

Publishing unscoped public packages

1. On the command line, navigate to the root directory of your package.

   cd /path/to/package

2. To publish your public package to the npm registry, run:

   npm publish

   Note: If you use GitHub Actions to publish your packages, you can generate provenance information for each package you publish. For more information, see "Generating provenance statements."

3. To see your public package page, visit https://npmjs.com/package/*package-name*, replacing *package-name* with the name of your package. Public packages will say public below the package name on the npm website.

For more information on the publish command, see the CLI documentation.

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Last edited by lukekarrys on October 23, 2023