Finally, OptimizeIt is released on npm!

npm was definitely the go-to, since I use it as a package manager for OptimizeIt. Let's discuss how this process went from A to Z.

Setting Up Releases

First things first, I had to create an account on npm. Afterwards, I had to update the package.json file to include repository, bugs, and homepage URLs. I also had to create an .npmignore file to ignore everything that is not included in the build directory. Then, I did a fresh install and build, and using the cli, I logged into my newly created npm account.

Once that was done, I created a tag for version 1.0.0, and I published OptimizeIt for the very first time using npm publish. I didn't have to update any code, files, or anything—it just worked!

It was much easier than expected, as those were the exact steps I took, and boom! OptimizeIt was now on npm!

This is great and all; however, I wanted to automate this. I didn't want to do this manually every single time. Additionally, after doing this, the releases section on the GitHub Repo was not updated with the most recently added release! I wanted a way to automate all of this—ideally: tag, publish to npm, publish on GitHub, finish.

To do this, I had to add a new job to my current workflow that runs only when a new tag is detected. I had to retrieve an NPM_TOKEN from my npm account and add it to GitHub Secrets so that my newly added job could access it to publish to npm!

For the GitHub releases part, however, I didn't have to create any secret manually, as the workflow already listens in on the repository's permissions and fetches the GITHUB_TOKEN, which is required to create a release on GitHub.

After adding the new workflow, creating a new release is simpler than ever. These are the exact steps that I must do every single time I need to create a new release:

npm version 1.0.2

git push origin v1.0.2

This will automatically trigger the workflow and execute linting, building, testing, and if all pass, publishing. Now, everything is automated—both npm and GitHub's releases are updated automatically!

Testing The Release

Testing the release went much better than I thought. The very first time OptimizeIt was run, it complained that no API Key was provided. However, a quick glance at the README.md immediately tells the user how to provide that using the toml config!

Afterwards, very thorough testing was done on all of its features, until... It was time for OptimizeIt to output some files. This is when the issue happened. Not that it wasn't working as intended, but whenever OptimizeIt creates a file in the output directory, it does so in the output directory in its directory. As in, if the user uses either its html, markdown, or output features, the file created is somewhere in node_modules in the system. While this does work, and it did work as intended... I personally thought this was very unintuitive and cumbersome. Therefore, small updates were done to OptimizeIt to now automatically create an output file at the current directory where the OptimizeIt call was invoked. As in, no matter where users are in their system, if they use any of OptimizeIt's output features, it will now automatically create an output folder and place the updated file within! This was much more intuitive than before, hassle-free, and very helpful!

Aside from that, no issues arose when testing OptimizeIt, and it works beautifully!

How Should You Use OptimizeIt

OptimizeIt is intended to be installed globally, as in:

npm i -g optimizeit

Its purpose is to offer help for the user, no matter where they are in their system. Using OptimizeIt has not changed! It works just like it always did; a very thorough explanation can be found here. However, a small example of my favorite feature is:

optimizeit examples/main.cpp examples/main.py --html

This would generate an html file in your output directory, showcasing the differences in the before and after usage of OptimizeIt:

Users can also customize its configurations however they want using the toml config option that OptimizeIt uses!

Summary

Now that OptimizeIt is released, anyone can use it for a little help in optimizing the performance of their source code! I know, I know—do not use AI to alter your code because it will break it, never use AI to write your code, it's unreadable, it's not good enough... I've heard it all. However, you, the reader, would be lying if you said you've never used AI before to help give you ideas on how to improve your code! I understand that no one should solely rely on AI to write their code; however, optimizing it, on the other hand, is something that every developer does! Whether it's to optimize an entire file, give you ideas on how to approach a problem differently, or simply make code readability improvements, OptimizeIt is here to help you Optimize it!

Well, what are you waiting for? Try it out!