Publishing Part To Npm

I published my library, _part_, to NPM today. As my first attempt to publish anything to NPM, I expected problems but not the ones I encountered.

I named _part_ to demonstrate the pattern within the name. You can use _part_ as a tool to bind the context/receiver of a native function or to “curry” the argument(s). Javascript allows leading underscore for variable names, so I thought I made a clever name.

I followed the publishing documentation without much trouble and I tested the installation process locally, as NPM suggests. Everything seemed fine.

However, NPM barfed when I tried to publish.

npm ERR! publish Failed PUT response 400
npm ERR! Error: bad_request Only reserved document ids may start with underscore.: _part_

While devastated, I felt the publishing process needed to continue, so I willingly:

1. changed the name to -part-.
2. changed all of the references in the documentation to -part-.
3. changed references in the build process to -part-.

npm ERR! publish Failed PUT response 403
npm ERR! Error: forbidden name invalid: -part-: -part-

Ouch!

So, I gave up being clever and just called the damned thing part. I will keep the documentation using the _part_ variable name and I will keep the same github repo. But I wished I would have known about this earlier.