Publishing packages

Nyssa packages are simply nyssa projects published on a Nyssa repository. This document highlights the steps and guides to publishing a package to a repository.

Package name guidelines

Before publishing a package, there are a few things you should consider when choosing a package name.

It must be unique. Package names are unique throughout a repository irrespective of who publishes them.

It is advisable to first search the repository you want to publish to (such as nyssa.bladelang.org) for any package already using the name you want to choose.

It is also highly possible but not conventional to have the same package published under different names in different repositories.

It should be descriptive.
It should not infringe on a someone else's trademarks nor be misleading.

Also, a good package names should be useable as a good variable names.

The README.md file

One of the files generated by nyssa during nyssa init is the README.md file. Before publishing a package, do your best to communicate as much information and/or documentation as you can in this file because this is the file that will be shown to people who come to browse your package on repositories.

The file is a Markdown file and should be treated as such. You can check Github's guide on Markdown to help you write more appealing READMEs.

Semantic versioning

Everytime you publish a new package or an update to an existing package, nyssa requires that the package version changes as well. Following the semantic versioning when changing/updating this version helps keep the ecosystem clean and predictable as well as easy to navigate for other developers.

When introducing a breaking change to a package, it's recommended that you increment the major version of the package.

Publishing to a repository

Before you can publish an application, you must have created and be logged in to a publisher account. See this guide on how to do that.

Once you are logged in to your publisher account, simply run the command nyssa publish from the root of your package and nyssa will take care of the rest.

Testing your package

One very important first things to do after publishing a package is testing that the package actually works and is importable in other applications without causing a crash or undesired side-effects.

To test your application after publising to a repository,

Create a new directory outside of your project (e.g. sample) and open a new terminal session in the directory. This can be done on Unix devices like this:

mkdir sample
cd sample

Create a new nyssa application in the directory by running nyssa init.
Run the command nyssa install <package_name>.
Open the file at app/index.b and insert code to import your package before every code in the file. E.g.

import <package_name>
echo 'Welcome to Nyssa. Magic begins here!'

Run the application (blade .)

If all goes well without crashing, then your package can be imported without crashing the user's application. From here on, you can write more tests.

In this example, the package_name was my_package.