The publish and pack commands interact with the pkg directory that's created when you run wasm-pack build. The pack command creates a tarball from the pkg directory and the publish command creates a tarball from the pkg directory and publishes it to the NPM registry.

Underneath, these commands use npm pack and npm publish. You can read more about these in the NPM documentation:

• npm pack
• npm publish

Both these commands take the path to the pkg directory as the first argument. You can either set the argument directly to the pkg directory or to the parent of the pkg directory:

$ wasm-pack pack myproject/pkg
| 🎒  packed up your package!
$ wasm-pack pack myproject
| 🎒  packed up your package!

If you try to call pack or publish on another directory, you get an error:

$ wasm-pack pack myproject/src/
Unable to find the pkg directory at path 'myproject/src/', or in a child directory of 'myproject/src/'

If you don't set a path, they use the current directory as the path.

You can also publish tagged releases with the optional --tag argument, e.g.

wasm-pack publish --tag next

By default, the latest tag is used to identify the current version of a package, and npm install <pkg> (without any @<version> or @<tag> specifier) installs the latest tag.

You can read more about distribution tags on NPM.