Deploying a module to npm

npm is the official package manager for Node. When we deploy a module to npm, we are uploading it to the official npm repository (which happens to be a CouchDB database).

Now that we've created a module, we can share it with the rest of the world using the same integrated tool that we retrieve modules with; that is, npm.

Getting ready

Building on the final state of mp3dat from the previous recipe, Extending a module's API (including all the changes we made in the There's More… section so that we can accept streams or filenames via the same stat method and our module also emits events), we'll make sure this canonical mp3dat is in a directory called mp3dat.

Before we can deploy to npm, we need to make a package.json file; so, let's do that for our module. In mp3dat, we'll create package.json and add some information (of course, we can always customize to whatever details work for us):

{
  "author": "David Mark Clements <[email protected]> (http://davidmarkclements...