Releasing with github, travis and unpkg.

I have just released a small JavaScript library: “reun”. During this, I streamlined my release process, with the following file structure

• dynamic files
  • main.js contains the code
  • README.md contains documentation (may be autogenerated from code later on)
  • package.json contains the version number, and meta information (may be autogenerated from the code later on)
• project-specific files
  • icon.png – icon for the project
  • .travis.yml – build recipe, need to run travis setup npm (and gem install travis before that) to update it for new projects.
  • CNAME – set the domain for your website
  • (config.xml for cordova deployment, not in this project)
  • (Dockerfile for automatic building of image / server deployment, not in this project)
• generic files
  • index.html – webpage for project that render README.md (or an app-entry loading main.js if it was an app instead of a library)
  • dev.sh – web server + live reload for use during development
  • LICENSE GPLv3
  • .gitignore ignore temporary files

When I bump the version number and commit to github, the following happens:

• GitHub makes the new version of the source code available on https://github.com/solsort/reun/.
• GitHub Pages updates the website on https://solsort.github.io/reun/.
• CloudFlare handles DNS, SSL, CDN, makes it available on https://reun.solsort.com/.
• Travis runs the tests, deploys the package to npmjs if successful. It shows the result on https://travis-ci.org/solsort/reun/.
• NPM now hosts a package of the latest version on https://www.npmjs.com/package/reun/.
• UNPKG now serves the package through the CDN on https://unpkg.com/reun/.
• (Docker Hub could automatically build and deploy an image to run on a server, and call a hook to reload the image)
• (PhoneGap Build could build the new version of the app to deploy on mobile phones).

This infrastructure is free for opensouce projects, and makes it trival/automatic to release new versions.