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I use prepack and that's it. @chris.manson.ie has used prepare as a means to paper over other folks not realizing their library needs to build :p

Yeah, "prepack" is the way to go. I just see it relatively little in practice. And sometimes people actually meant to use "dependencies" instead of "prepare".

I feel like what people should be using keeps changing. prepublishOnly makes sure my library does its thing before publishing it so I use it. On CI I skip it. Scripts like “prepare”, “prepack” and previously unknown “dependencies” have vague names which I can’t for the life of me memorize.

But also I have memory issues (medication side effect) so that might be also it. prepublishOnly is easy.

"prepack" happens before packing. This is where your build script should go. "prepublishOnly" happens before publishing. I can’t think of any use case for that. "dependencies" runs if `npm install` changes your node_modules. This is the right place for something like "husky". It’s a bit more niche

prepublishOnly is then fine for tests, linting, type checking, checking formatting etc., is it not? Or is the implication that pnpm publish would ensure the main branch, and the code that ends there is already checked?

pnpm publish verifying the branch is new, I think. Before that you could run from anywhere, that’s one of the reasons why I think it’s good to perform checks as part of local publish. The other assumption, I assume, is that people would not publish locally, only on CI?

I don’t think what people should use really changes. Instead I think there are a lot of uninformed recommendations out there.

And yeah, this could be true as well, in the early days different approaches were circulating, people weren’t quite sure what was the “correct” one. (And still aren’t.) A good topic for a blog post if you were thinking of writing something.

James Sumners

@james.sumners.info

Because people insist on writing not JavaScript and so need a build procedure.