Starter Kitty

Starter Kitty is a collection of common utilities and packages for JavaScript projects. It is designed to provide sensible defaults for common tasks, such as file system operations and input validation.

Why starter-kitty?

Application security is hard. There are often many ways to get it wrong, and it's easy to make mistakes when you're trying to ship features quickly. This package provides a set of components that are safe-by-default, so you can focus on building your app without worrying about common security footguns.

Documentation

Please refer to the documentation website for detailed API documentation and usage examples.

Packages

• @opengovsg/starter-kitty-validators: Common input validators.

Releasing

Releases are managed with Changesets. Only public packages are published; private workspace packages (e.g. the shared config packages) are skipped automatically.

Day-to-day flow

1. In any PR that changes a publishable package, add a changeset describing the change:

   pnpm changeset
   

   Pick the affected package and bump type (patch / minor / major), then commit the generated .changeset/*.md file along with your code.

2. When the PR merges into develop, the Release workflow opens (or updates) a "Version Packages" PR that applies the pending changesets — bumping versions and updating CHANGELOG.md.

3. Merging the "Version Packages" PR publishes the new versions to npm. Publishing uses npm OIDC trusted publishing, so no npm token is stored in the repo.

Prerelease (beta) mode

Changesets supports a pre mode for cutting prerelease versions (e.g. 1.4.0-beta.0) instead of stable ones. Pre mode is toggled by the presence of a committed .changeset/pre.json file — it is a shared, repo-wide switch, not a per-developer setting. To check the current state, look for .changeset/pre.json: if it exists with "mode": "pre", the repo is in prerelease mode.

To enter prerelease mode (subsequent releases become …-beta.N):

pnpm changeset pre enter beta
git add .changeset/pre.json
git commit -m "chore: enter changesets pre mode"

To exit prerelease mode and return to stable releases:

pnpm changeset pre exit   # flips .changeset/pre.json to "exit" mode only
git add .changeset/pre.json
git commit -m "chore: exit changesets pre mode"

Once the change lands on develop, the next "Version Packages" PR resolves versions accordingly — prerelease versions (…-beta.N, published under the beta dist-tag) while in pre mode, or stable versions (e.g. 1.3.0-beta.3 → 1.4.0, published under latest) once exited.

Snapshot releases

To publish a throwaway version for testing (tagged snapshot on npm, never latest), run the Release workflow manually from the Actions tab with the Create snapshot release input enabled.