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Package aliases

Now that you have published a shared dependency to Eik and seen how to update it, it's time to set up an alias.

A refresher from the introduction:

Instead of importing specific versions, Eik encourages the use of aliases to share the same major semantic version between applications.

Giving a package an alias​

When we left our lodash example we had version 4.17.21 published to the URL https://eik.store.com/npm/lodash/4.17.21/index.js.

The Eik CLI has an alias command that works like so:

eik login --key YOUR_EIK_KEY --server https://eik.store.com
eik npm-alias lodash 4.17.21 4 --server https://eik.store.com

Let's break down the alias command a bit.

  • Its first argument lodash is the name from eik.json.
  • The second argument 4.17.21 is the version we want to alias.
  • The third argument 4 is the alias we want to create or update.

The --server argument lets you run the login and alias commands without having eik.json in the current directory.

Now you can go to https://eik.store.com/npm/lodash/v4/index.js in a browser, and you should be redirected to the version you aliased.

tip

On servers running @eik/service 5.1.0 or newer you can also go to https://eik.store.com/npm/lodash/~4/index.js (~4 instead of v4) to get the file directly with stale-while-revalidate cache headers, saving the browser from following a redirect.

This is particularly useful for assets on the critical path, like global CSS and font files.

Updating an alias​

We saw how to update a shared dependency, so let's see how to update an alias as well.

Make a note of the new version you want your alias to point to. Then log in, and run the alias command with the new version number.

eik login --key YOUR_EIK_KEY --server https://eik.store.com
eik npm-alias lodash 4.18.0 4 --server https://eik.store.com

Next steps​

Now that you've seen how to make aliases it's time to gather up your shared dependencies in import maps so they're easier to use.