Force publish only specific package(s)

Expected Behavior

Pass --force-publish and some other flag to only force publish specific or multiple packages, but not all. One may say to use with --ignore-changes but it seems to not work, meaning that it treats all the packages and seems to ignore the ignore-changes flag completely.

The use case is when you have dist changed but not sources, but you know for sure that the dist is different (has changed) and want to bump version.

Current Behavior

No way of doing it? --force-publish and --ignore-changes doesn’t play well together.

Possible Solution

Don’t know.

Steps to Reproduce (for bugs)

1. Have 5 or 10 packages
2. Want to force publish only 2-3
3. ignore the rest

Removed the rest of the issue template, since it doesn’t apply.

[evocateur]

Removed the rest of the issue template, since it doesn’t apply.

I’d say the version of lerna that you’re using is rather applicable. As is the exact command(s) you attempted. And what (if any) configuration is present in lerna.json.

I’ll practice reading your mind, I guess. Hand-waving, I assume you tried something like this:

npx lerna publish \
  --force-publish foo-package \
  --force-publish @scope/bar-package \
  --ignore-changes '**'

One thing to note, if you do ignore everything except an explicit subset, any changes outside of the subset will be forever lost to subsequent publishes, as far as Lerna is concerned. That is, the next time you run lerna publish without all the fancy forcing, it won’t consider the previously-ignored packages to have changed, and thus won’t publish them.

I would recommend you avoid using the --ignore-changes flag for this purpose, and just accept that Lerna will publish what has changed since the previous release tag in addition to the stuff you forced (which is valid in this case, for sure, build changes and whatnot won’t get recognized).

[evocateur]

Interesting, very strange and crazy.

It’s literally how tags work in git? That’s what Lerna uses to determine what changed since the last release. The “last release” is the previous annotated git tag.

You can always pass specific globs to --force-publish if you don’t want to version the world. It has the same caveats when combined with --ignore-changes, however, and is generally only used to ensure certain packages always get published (Babel itself uses this for some of their packages due to a weird dependency graph).