atom/docs/publishing-a-package.md

Publishing a Package

This guide will show you how to publish a package or theme to the atom.io package registry.

Publishing a package allows other people to install it and use it in Atom. It is a great way to share what you've made and get feedback and contributions from others.

This guide assumes your package's name is my-package but you should pick a better name.

Install apm

The apm command line utility that ships with Atom supports publishing packages to the atom.io registry.

Check that you have apm installed by running the following command in your terminal:

apm help publish

You should see a message print out with details about the apm publish command.

If you do not, launch Atom and run the Atom > Install Shell Commmands menu to install the apm and atom commands.

Prepare Your Package

If you've followed the steps in the your first package doc then you should be ready to publish and you can skip to the next step.

If not, there are a few things you should check before publishing:

• Your package.json file contains the accurate name, description, and repository information.
• Your package.json file has a version field of 0.0.0.
• Your package.json file has an engines field that contains an entry for Atom such as: "engines": {"atom": ">=0.50.0"}.
• Your package is stored in a git repository that is hosted on GitHub.
• Your package has a README.md file at the root.

Publish Your Package

One last thing to check before publishing is that a package with the same name hasn't already been published to atom.io. You can do so by visiting http://atom.io/packages/my-package to see if the package already exists. If it does, update your package's name to something that is available.

Run the following commands to publish your package (this assumes your package is located at ~/github/my-package).

cd ~/github/my-package
apm publish minor

If this is the first time you are publishing, the apm publish command may prompt you for your GitHub] username and password. This is required to publish and you only need to enter this information the first time you publish. The credentials are stored securely in your keychain once you login.

The minor option to the publish command tells apm to increment the second digit of the version before publishing so the published version will be 0.1.0. You could have run apm publish major to publish a 1.0.0 version but since this is your first version it is better to start with minor release. You can read more about semantic versioning here.

The publish command also creates and pushes a Git tag for this release. You should now see a v0.1.0 tag in your Git repository after publishing.

🎉 Your package is now published and available on atom.io. Head on over to http://atom.io/packages/my-package to see your package's page. People can now install it by running apm install my-package or from the Atom settings view via the Atom > Preferences... menu.