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How to publish binaries on npm

Blog post from Sentry

Post Details
Company
Date Published
Author
Luca Forstner
Word Count
2,582
Company Posts That Month
15
Language
English
Hacker News Points
-
Post removed?
No
Summary

This comprehensive guide discusses how to effectively distribute platform-specific binaries using npm, focusing on the challenges and solutions encountered by Sentry with their @sentry/cli package. The guide highlights the difficulty of including large binaries for different operating systems and architectures within a single npm package due to size constraints. It explores two primary strategies: using `optionalDependencies`, which allows package managers to install only the relevant binary for the user's system based on `os` and `cpu` fields, and employing a `postinstall` script to download the necessary binary if the corresponding optional dependency is not installed. The post also addresses potential pitfalls, such as supply chain attacks and the disabling of these features in some setups, recommending the implementation of both strategies to ensure reliability. Additionally, the guide provides detailed instructions and code snippets for implementing these strategies, considerations for optimizing the process, and advice on handling errors and inefficiencies that may arise during binary distribution.

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