Docker-node: What would be a good way to configure yarn/npm to consume a private registry?

[rwillians]

I have had a hard time trying to consume my private registry recently (I'm using https://github.com/verdaccio/verdaccio) from within the container. I'm not sure if this would be the right channel to do this but I would like to share how I've managed to accomplish it.

Since I have began using both Docker and Node very recently I guess this might not be a "pretty" solution, so If you have a finer one I'd be very thankful if you could share it.

---

In order to make this solution compatible for both my local environment and docker build (also for both yarn and npm), I've set the following environment variables:

.env:

NPM_REGISTRY_HOST=my-private-registry.domain.com
NPM_REGISTRY_PORT=4873
NPM_REGISTRY_PROTOCOL=http
NPM_REGISTRY_TOKEN=MY_S3CR3T_T0K3N

I have places this .npmrc in my project's root directory:

registry=${NPM_REGISTRY_PROTOCOL}://${NPM_REGISTRY_HOST}:${NPM_REGISTRY_PORT}/
_auth=${NPM_REGISTRY_TOKEN}
always-auth=true

Here's my Dockerfile (note that my project requires to build bcrypt so I'm installing some virtual dependencies):

FROM node:7-alpine

LABEL maintainer "Rafael Willians <[email protected]>"

ARG NPM_REGISTRY_HOST
ARG NPM_REGISTRY_PORT="4873"
ARG NPM_REGISTRY_PROTOCOL="https"
ARG NPM_REGISTRY_TOKEN

RUN mkdir -p /usr/src/app
WORKDIR /usr/src/app

COPY .npmrc .
COPY package.json .
RUN time apk add --no-cache --virtual .build-deps \
        binutils-gold \
        curl \
        g++ \
        gcc \
        gnupg \
        libgcc \
        linux-headers \
        make \
        python \
    && time yarn --no-emoji --prod \
    && apk del .build-deps

COPY . .

RUN rm .npmrc

EXPOSE 3000

And here's how I've passed my local environment variables from my docker-compose.yml:

version: '3'

services:
    auth:
        build:
            context: .
            args:
                NPM_REGISTRY_HOST: ${NPM_REGISTRY_HOST}
                NPM_REGISTRY_PORT: ${NPM_REGISTRY_PORT}
                NPM_REGISTRY_PROTOCOL: ${NPM_REGISTRY_PROTOCOL}
                NPM_REGISTRY_TOKEN: ${NPM_REGISTRY_TOKEN}
        command: yarn start
        environment:
            DEBUG: '*:server'
            NODE_ENV: ${NODE_ENV}
        expose:
            - 3000
        ports:
            - '3000:3000'

Edited:
this "solution" actually didn't work as expected. It only worked at the beginning because my private registry was configured to allow anonymous users to download private packages. Already fixed that.

[Starefossen]

Actually you can set registry URL using the npm_config_registry environment variable.

[Starefossen]

Related npm discussion npm/npm#8356

[rwillians]

Thanks @Starefossen! This seems to be a VERY straightforward solution, I'll try it out.

[rwillians]

@Starefossen npm_config_registry helped a lot, thanks!

I needed to go a little bit further to make it work as I needed. You see, my registry host is also a dynamic address, so I can't afford to have a .npmrc files with that //my-registry.foo.bar/:_authToken="$3CR3T", but I've accomplish to set everything using only environment variables.

I had to look into npm source code in order to learn how to do it, but worthed the time.

So if anyone out there is looking for how to set a private registry and its auth using only environment variables, here's how you can do it:

NPM_CONFIG_REGISTRY=http://my.private.registry:4873/
NPM_CONFIG_USERNAME=username
NPM_CONFIG_EMAIL=email
NPM_CONFIG__PASSWORD=secret

I hope it can save someone else a bit of time.

[Starefossen]

Thanks for sharing @rwillians 👍🏼😄

[LaurentGoderre]

Can we close then?

[rwillians]

@LaurentGoderre yes

Just one more thing: it didn't work seamlessly for yarn, but I managed to work around by using basic auth.

NPM_CONFIG_USERNAME=user
NPM_CONFIG__PASSWORD=secret
NPM_CONFIG_EMAIL=user@provider
NPM_CONFIG_REGISTRY=http://$NPM_CONFIG_USERNAME:[email protected]:4873/

[mk-pmb]

Easier urlencode (no backslashes => survives misguided de-/quoting):

od -An -v -t x1 -w65536 | tr ' ' '%'

65536 = 256^2 is the maximum width that my od can use without the bug of prefixing lots of %.

PS: Why the -e option in your echo command? Shouldn't the password config var store the password verbatim?

[rwillians]

@mk-pmb thanks for sharing. That's just a partial snippet from stackoverflow, I have a very limited experience with bash scripting.

In order to avoid further discussion off-topic, I'll change my snippet to use a password with no special chars.