Command: Publish

$ pub publish [--dry-run] [--force] [--server <url>]

This command publishes your package on pub.dartlang.org for anyone to download and depend on. For example, if your package is named transmogrify, it will be listed on http://pub.dartlang.org/packages/transmogify, and users can depend on it in their pubspecs and get it via pub install using something like:

dependencies:
  transmogrify: ">= 1.0.0 < 2.0.0"

When publishing a package, it’s important to follow the pubspec format and package layout conventions. Some of these are required in order for others to be able to use your package. Others are suggestions to help make it easier for users to understand and work with your package. In both cases, pub will try to help you by pointing out what changes will help make your package play nicer with the Dart ecosystem. There are a few additional requirements for uploading a package:

• You must include a license file (named LICENSE, COPYING, or some variation) that contains an open-source license. We recommend the BSD license, which is used by Dart itself. You must also have the legal right to redistribute anything that you upload as part of your package.

• Your package must be less than ten megabytes large after gzip compression. If it’s too large, consider splitting it into multiple packages, or cutting down on the number of included resources or examples.

• Your package should only have hosted dependencies. Git dependencies are allowed but strongly discouraged; not everyone using Dart has Git installed, and Git dependencies don’t support version resolution as well as hosted dependencies do.

Be aware that the email address associated with your Google account will be displayed on pub.dartlang.org along with any packages you upload.

What files are published?

All files in your package will be included in the published package, with the following exceptions:

• Any packages directories.
• Your package’s lockfile.
• If you’re using Git, any files ignored by your .gitignore file.
• If you aren’t using Git, all “hidden” files (that is, files whose names begin with .).

If there are other files you don’t want to include, be sure to delete them (or add them to .gitignore) before running pub publish.

To be on the safe side, pub publish will list all files it’s going to publish for you to look over before it actually uploads your package.

Options

--dry-run or -n

With this, pub goes through the validation process but does not actually upload the package. This is useful if you want to see if your package meets all of the publishing requirements before you’re ready to actually go public.

--force or -f

With this, pub does not ask for confirmation before publishing. Normally, it shows you the package contents and asks for you to confirm the upload.

If there are any errors in your package, it is not uploaded and this exits with an error. If there are warnings, it will be uploaded. If you want to ensure your package has no warnings before uploading, either don’t use --force, or use --dry-run first.

--server

If you pass --server followed by a URL, it will attempt to publish the package to that server. It assumes the server supports the same HTTP API that pub.dartlang.org uses.

This can be useful if you’re running your own local package server for testing. The main pub server is itself open source and available here.