👍

👍 would be highly useful on many of my projects :)

This would be great. I've wanted to script actions that run prior to publish only on npm modules before but was unable to do so.

@othiym23 has been promising to drop by this issue…

But till then, https://www.npmjs.com/package/in-publish let's you do exactly this today without new lifecycles or backwards compatibility issues.

@iarna thanks I am aware of in-publish, but reading it's code i see it's more complicated than my PR, and relies on a obscure npm api (i didn't know that the config is passed to the as JSON in an env var!)

I guess I'd be okay with in-publish (although that solution is uglier) if that was officially supported by npm.

Actually, I discussed this with @othiym23 at andyet conf the other day, he said he wouldn't merge this, because he did not want to add (more) cruft to npm, and that he was committed to (eventually) fixing this by changing the prepublish behavior. That is what i recall - I'll let @othiym23 correct me though.

I see his point of view, but i do disagree. Yes it is cruft, but npm already has lots of cruft. does it really hurt to have a little more, carefully considered cruft? If we graph cruft over time and measure the area under the graph, how do we minimize total cumulative cruft? I argue that a new script command is that minimal cruft solution.
offically supporting in-publish is a bit more crufty, in my opinion, but i'll reluctantly accept that otherwise...

RE: cruft, which node core also very carefully considers:

I always state that things that people need and are painful for users to make in userland probably belong in core. (Usually c++ things in our case.)

Considering this has been painful to people for literally years, and has only recently been solved by an employee of npm by using obscure workarounds, I personally think that fits the bill for taking it in.

(In one way or other.)

Closing in favor of #10074. I hope the discussion in #10074 accurately captures the in-person discussion that you and I had about prepublish, @dominictarr. Thank you for that conversation and for putting this together, Let me know over there if you think I captured it incorrectly.