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Private npm registry with fallback to global registry

on nodejs, devops

The requirement

From time to time we need to use npm packages on following machines:

  • Continuous Integration build agent
  • with no access to internet (usually CI agent)
  • with slow internet proxy

Moreover as Windows developers we have Windows servers.

Prerequisites

There are few mostly obvious prerequisites. I will list them to make sure You won't forget about anything:

  • Windows server (or Linux one) - can be a simple virtual machine
  • Installed nodejs from https://nodejs.org/
  • Installed and configured CTLM (if your proxy need this)

Sinopia

Sinopia is a private/caching npm repository server. To install it just run: 

npm install sinopia -g

To "run" it just create a new directory, enter it and start sinopia 

mkdir sinopia  
cd sinopia  
sinopia

Two important things just happened:

  1. In your profile a config.yaml file was created (something like C:\Users\XXXXXX\AppData\Roaming\sinopia\config.yaml)
  2. The server started on default port (enter URL in browser to see it)

Config in global dir is cool but useless. So let's copy it to current dir and run sinopia with: 

sinopia.cmd --config .\config.yaml

Useful configuration

There are some points we should add or change in configuration:

  • Changing the port to "normal" one like 80 or 8080. In the end of config.yaml we need to add:
listen:  
 - 0.0.0.0:80              # listen on all addresses (INADDR_ANY)
  • Add proxy with
http_proxy: http://localhost:3128/  
https_proxy: http://localhost:3128/  
no_proxy: localhost,127.0.0.1
  • Depends on your proxy change https://registry.npmjs.org/ to http://registry.npmjs.org/

To verify if everything above is working just run again: 

sinopia.cmd --config .\config.yaml

Create a Windows service

Because I mainly work on Windows environment I need to run above a Windows service.
I decided to use winser package.
The easiest usage is to create package.json and add commands in it.

Sum up

All above stuff and changes I put in simple github repo. If you find any error contact me and I will fix it. Just clone, fix port if you need and run npm install as windows administrator.