Using Lerna to publish packages

Pupilfirst LMS is a monorepo, that contains the main web application and other libraries we've developed. Lerna is the tool that we use to manage this multi-package repository.

Steps

1. Update the library.
2. Commit your work, but do not push to Github.
3. Use changed command to verify changes to packages.
4. Use version command to amend last commit.
5. Use publish command to publish updated packages to npmjs.com.
6. Push latest commits to Github.

Details

When you're done making changes to a library, you can commit your changes as usual. DO NOT push changes to Github yet.

Once that's done, check for packages that Lerna can publish new versions of:

yarn run lerna changed

This command will show all the packages that have changed since the last release. You can also use the diff command to see the diff between current version and the last published version.

Once you've confirmed the changes, you can use the version command to amend the last commit, to include version bumps.

yarn run lerna version --amend

This command will ask you how to change the version of changed packages. It'll then update the last commit, changing versions as per your instruction and also tagging the commit.

Once the commit is ready, you can use it to publish updated packages to npmjs.com. If you haven't logged into npmjs.com prior to this, you'll need to login with the npm login command before publishing.

yarn run lerna publish from-git

This command will read the version info from the repo, and publish packages.

Don't forget to push the commit to Github as well!

Why use the version command?

Why bother with version? Why not just run publish and allow it to set the version?

Running publish [bump] after committing your changes will cause lerna to create a new commit which includes the version bump and the git tags. Using the version command allows us to avoid this extra commit which lets the git history be just a little bit less noisy.