

What does Factorio and CI/CD pipelines have in common?
Manual and, letโs face it, often quite tedious tasks can easily be automated with modern tools such as Github Actions. When combined with a private registry we can facilitate collaboration and increase quality by keeping better track of our code supply pipeline.
Full disclosure: Iโm one of the founders behind the product Bytesafe (https://bytesafe.dev/) that offers free, secure and highly available private NPM registries.
Below Iโll describe, step by step, an easy workflow to setup, used for building and publishing Javascript npm packages. We will use a private registry which can be used as sandbox before releasing code into the wild. This way you may be able to find potential bugs before your end users do. We will be using Github actions to automate the build
So youโll probably have something way more interesting to build for your workflow, but for this post weโll create a new empty package named โ@niclas-test/testโ with the below package.json that describes the package.
Weโll setup an package.json with some basic information, package name, git location etc.
{
"name": "@niclas-test/test",
"version": "1.0.0",
"description": "My test package",
"main": "index.js",
"scripts": {
"test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
},
"repository": {
"type": "git",
"url": "git+https://github.com/niclas-g/test.git"
},
"keywords": [
"private",
"repo",
"github",
"actions"
],
"author": "Niclas G",
"license": "ISC",
"bugs": {
"url": "https://github.com/niclas-g/test/issues"
},
"homepage": "https://github.com/niclas-g/test#readme"
}
Letโs add something interesting to this package:
index.js
const myPackage = require('./package.json');
const getSecret = () => {
return 'thisisthesecret from version ' + myPackage.version;
};
exports.getSecret = getSecret;
Nice, our package is done, letโs head over to Github and define our Github Actions workflow, well, weโll stay in our local environment as we define the workflow using code.
Github actions reside in the dedicated directoryย github/workflows
name: Deploy from master
on:
push:
branches:
- master
jobs:
build:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v2
- uses: actions/setup-node@v1
with:
node-version: 12
- run: npm ci
publish-npm:
needs: build
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v2
- uses: actions/setup-node@v1
with:
node-version: 12
registry-url: https://<YOURREGISTRY>.bytesafe.dev/r/default
- run: npm ci
- run: npm publish
env:
NODE_AUTH_TOKEN: ${{secrets.npm_token}}
A couple of things to point out in the snippet above
For this post, weโll publish our package to aย Bytesafe private registry. Itโs free to sign-up and use, head over and set up your own private registry now, itโll take less than a minute. Iโll wait here.
(There are of course other options out there and the workflow should be similar)
Done? Great!
In the Github workflow script we refer to a secret used by npm to authenticate towards the private registry:
NODE_AUTH_TOKEN: ${{secrets.npm_token}}
You configure this secret in the Github repository. It is this access token that will enable you to upload/publish your packages to the registry.
To setup additionally Bytesafe registries in the same account is trivial, but weโll settle for the โdefaultโ one that is supplied upon account creation.
The credentials to this registry are shown onย https://bytesafe.devย under the registry details page:
To acquire the token needed, we run the standard NPM command with the following options to login:
$ npm --registry https://<account>.bytesafe.dev/r/<registry> login
Username: bytesafe
Password: ******
Email: (this IS public) user@yourdoma.in
Logged in as bytesafe on https://<account>.bytesafe.dev/r/<registry>
After you have successfully logged in, you get the token with the following command:
$ npm --registry https://<account>.bytesafe.dev/r/<registry> token create
npm password:
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โ token โ 01E54TK8T๐ค๐ค๐ค๐ค๐ค๐ค B0TQโ
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โ readonly โ false โ
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โ cidr_whitelist โ null โ
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โ created โ 2020-04-05T09:26:26Z โ
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Next, add the token to the Github repository, clickย Settingsย ->ย Secretsย -> โAdd a new secretโ and name it โnpm_tokenโ, enter the data from the token row above.
Go ahead and do:
$ git push
Head over to GitHub and to theย actions tabย in your repository and see the build progressing, chances are that you are to late, the build is usually quite fast:
And for validation: go back to Bytesafe web console and verify that the package was shipped:
And there you have it: A (very) basic pipeline that will build your code upon commits to master and deploy the packages to your private npm registry, ready to be consumed by your and your teamโs applications.
^ Basic pipeline?
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