npm private registry username with special characters

Question

I'm trying to access a private npm registry that is hosted in a remote server. I have to access it using username and password. There is no proxy on my side.

But, the username and password which I use, have URL unsafe characters. I've tried adduser, npmjs, scl but I'm unable to configure the credentials :

npm WARN Name may not contain non-url-safe chars 

I've tried to set NPM_USER and NPM_PASS directly from command line. I'm able to set the former but the later fails. Even if I use a simple password and try :

npm login 

It fails with the same error since NPM_USER has a @

I'm using npmrc to switch between public and private registries. I want to avoid tools like Nexus/JFrog.

npm version - 4.0.5 and OS is Windows 7

What am I missing here?

Answer 1

So to recap, your problem is that your private registry uses email addresses for user names, which is not currently supported by the npm command line tools. You need a way to provide your user name without running npm adduser or npm login. I don't know which registry you are using, but I had the same problem with Inedo's Proget.

EDIT: I have the same problem in March 2021, with Azure Artifacts in Azure DevOps, because the npm command-line tools still don't allow @ in usernames, and also the vsts-npm-auth command-line tool does not work on Linux or Mac. I have also had the same problem with Artifactory.

If you're using a private registry and you are using scopes to separate the different registries, you can create an .npmrc file that looks like this:

#Settings for @SCOPENAME @SCOPENAME:registry=https://DOMAIN/FEED/ //DOMAIN/FEED/:username=USER@DOMAIN //DOMAIN/FEED/:_password=BASE64(PASSWORD) //DOMAIN/FEED/:email=EMAIL_ADDRESS //DOMAIN/FEED/:always-auth=true  #Settings for @OTHERSCOPENAME @OTHERSCOPENAME:registry=... 

This next bit might be important, but it depends on your registry's preferred feed urls: I couldn't get this to work properly without the trailing / so take care to try both with and without it.

An easy way to get the base64 encoding of your password is to run:

echo -n 'PASSWORD' | base64 

EDIT: For some registries, like Azure Artifacts, you need to use a personal access token instead of your normal password. Look up the instructions for your registry about how to create a token.

EDIT: It's also possible to have the .npmrc file without scopes, if you are only using one registry:

# Global settings registry=https://DOMAIN/FEED/ //DOMAIN/FEED/:username=USER@DOMAIN //DOMAIN/FEED/:_password=BASE64(PASSWORD) //DOMAIN/FEED/:email=EMAIL_ADDRESS //DOMAIN/FEED/:always-auth=true