Smuggling .gitignore, .npmrc and friends in npm packages
I recently needed to include a number of .gitignore and an .npmrc files in an npm package. I was surprised to find that the npm publish command strips these out of the published package by default. As a consequence, This broke my package, and so I needed to find a way to get round this shortcoming.
This post shows how to use zipping and unzipping with postinstall and prepare scripts to include these files into your npm package.
I'm currently beavering away on a "create-*-app" tool that generates new projects from a number of available templates. That tool takes the form of a CLI tool built with TypeScript, published as a package to an npm registry and consumed with npx. Significantly, the templates that ship with the CLI take the form of a templates folder in the package, and the folders in those templates include .npmrc and .gitignore files; which are key to the functionality of the templates.
When publishing my npm package, I discovered that the .npmrc and .gitignore files in subfolders were being stripped from the package. After a little research, I happened upon this GitHub issue about npm which describes some of the behaviour I was seeing. After a touch more digging, I came to understand that this behaviour is a result of npm treating the .gitignore and .npmrc files as configuration files rather than part of the package's intended content.
