Npm install from repo not running `prepare`

One thing to check that hit me on a package recently - if there is a .gitignore and not .npmignore npm may be ignoring your /dist folder. Adding an empty .npmignore worked in this case.

"If there’s no .npmignore file, but there is a .gitignore file, then npm will ignore the stuff matched by the .gitignore file. If you want to include something that is excluded by your .gitignore file, you can create an empty .npmignore file to override it."

from https://docs.npmjs.com/misc/developers

For those that are wondering the status of this. I was unable to ever get it to work. What I ended up doing was hosting the components on a private npm registry and that works fine since the npm publish command will do the build and only publish the dist folder

If adding an empty .npmignore does not help, you can try specifying all files in dist explicitly in package.json#files. If this works you might want to consider using a wildcard pattern that matches the files in dist to simplify the package.json.

package.json

    ...
    "files": [
        "source",
        "dist/cjs/main.js",
        "dist/es/main.js"
    ]
}

see this comment to a similar issue in the npm/cli repository https://github.com/npm/cli/issues/1287#issuecomment-635021757