Feature request: CLI command that can determine if we have permission to publish a given package

[jedwards1211]

I want to make a PR to @semantic-release/npm to verify if the npm token has permission to publish a given package to npm, and if not, error out before doing any other semantic-release steps like creating a GitHub release, etc.

Right now if publishing to npm fails, it fails after a GitHub tag and release have been created, and to get semantic-release working again, you have to manually delete the GitHub tag and release first.

If I could precheck the npm permission, then we would never wind up in a state where we have to manually fix things. The promise is this is seems impossible to determine with the commands the npm CLI currently provides.

I was trying to use npm access list packages $(npm whoami) <pkgname> but there are two problems:

• It just 403s on granular npm tokens, even if they have write permission on <pkgname>
• If the package doesn't exist yet, the response looks the same as if we can't even read it.

So, we need a CLI command that can definitely tell us if the npm token has permission to publish a given package. That is:

• If the package is not visible, false
• If the package exists, true iff the npm token can publish a new version
• If the package doesn't exist, true iff the npm token can create it

This goes for both scoped and non-scoped packages.