Publishing a JavaScript library can be overwhelming these days. You want to reach a crowd as broad as possible, but there are dozens of different approaches existing and choices to be made. This article is a quick summary of current best practices, which are developing with npm, and publishing via npm and Bower package managers as well as a universal standalone distributable file. To follow, you need to be familiar with npm.

In the good old times when Prototype and jQuery were competing for the default JS framework, publishing a JS library was easy. Provide a download of the .js file somewhere, optionally add a fancy minified version, and specify the dependencies on other libraries that had to be present. Potential users would manually download the file (CDNs were just starting to be used), add it to their project, take care that the dependencies were met, and hopefully get it to work. Today, there are dependency managers that just require a single install command and take care about (almost) everything else. This of course requires some legwork to be done by the developer, which isn’t too straightforward as I recently found out. In an experiment on publishing a simple JS library called gallerygrid.js, it took me quite an amount of research time to figure out how to publish it, almost more than the actual time needed to develop the library itself. So this is a guide that sums up the current best practice and required steps to publish a JavaScript library.