In this tutorial I want to explain how to publish a private npm package to GitHub Packages using GitHub Actions. Also, the package will be linked to a private repository belonging to an organization. For this tutorial, I'm going to use my-pkg as the name of the package and @my-organization as the name of the organization.

Publishing the package

1. Create the package.json file. Example:

   .code

   Important:

   • The name of the package must have this structure: @organization/package-name | "name": "@my-organization/my-pkg"
   • You have to set the URL of your repository | "repository": "git://github.com/my-organization/my-pkg.git"
   • This attribute serves to tell GitHub that you will publish this package to its registry | "publishConfig": {"registry": "https://npm.pkg.github.com"}
   • Even if the package will be private, the value of this attribute must be false | "private": false

2. Create the workflow .yml file in .github/workflows folder

   .code

   Important:

   • This workflow executes when the master branch is pushed. It is responsible to install and build the package using npm through the name: Install dependencies and name: Build package steps
   • Before execute the two previous steps, it is important to set registry-url: "https://registry.npmjs.org" to indicate to GitHub you will use the npm registry to build the package
   • Before publish the package, it is necessary to set registry-url: "https://npm.pkg.github.com" to indicate to GitHub you will publish the package to its packages registry
   • To upload the package is required to set NODE_AUTH_TOKEN: ${{secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN}}, it is a secret created by GitHub automatically in the project's repository. Also, you can use another authentication method like personal access tokens. In this link you can read more about this

Installing the published package in a project

1. Create a .npmrc file on the root folder of the project that will use the published package

   .code

   In this link you can see how to create a personal access token

2. Add the package to the package.json file dependencies

   .code

3. Install the dependencies executing npm install

Final words

Sometimes, these kind of tasks are hard, specially for no expert people in deployments, servers and infrastructure like me. I hope that this tutorial has been useful for you.