npm Publish Latest Tag

A library for getting a tag value to supply to the npm publish command so that updates to old major versions don't automatically get given the latest tag.

Why use this?

If you provide no tags to the npm publish command then npm automatically gives that release the latest tag. The version with the latest tag is the one a user will get if they npm install without specifying a tag or a version.

This library returns a string for you to supply to the npm publish command with the --tag flag so that your current major version always keeps the latest tag.

Updates to older major versions will get a tag that is specific to that major version. Pre-releases/alphas/betas/etc will be tagged as such for their major version, no matter if it's an older, current, or newer major version.

Examples

Scenario	Outputted tag value	Example where current version is 2.3.4
Publishing new major version	latest	3.0.0 ➜ latest
Publishing minor/patch to current major release	latest	2.4.0 ➜ latest
Publishing minor/patch to old major release	latest-X where X is the major version	1.4.5 ➜ latest-1
Publishing pre-release/alpha/beta/etc	latest-X-Y where X is the major version and Y is the first pre-release section	3.0.0-beta ➜ latest-3-beta

Usage

To use this library, import it and run getLatestTag, passing in the location of the package.json for the npm package:

var npmPublishLatestTag = require("npm-publish-latest-tag");

// ...
npmPublishLatestTag.getLatestTag("./package.json").then(tagToPublishWith => {
  //...
});

import { getLatestTag } from "npm-publish-latest-tag";

// ...
const tagToPublishWith = await getLatestTag("./package.json");
//...

License

npm-publish-latest-tag and npm-publish-latest-tag-github-action are licensed under the ISC License.