Unable to publish to an NPM Registry (local)

Question

I am running Nexus 3.0.1-01, and am using it to host both Maven repositories and NPM registries. For NPM, I have a local mirror of npmjs.org, a local NPM registry and a group that combines the two...

I have been using this with npm internally, where I can use the npm-public group as my registry and this has been working fine. So, I can use Nexus to mirror npmjs.

The next step is to take locally written npm modules and publish them to npm-releases (on my Nexus instance) so that these modules can be shared amongst the delivery teams here. I've been able to build out a package, and npm pack seems to behave.

I have run npm adduser to provide my Nexus credentials to my npm environment. I am using the same username/password I use when I log into the Nexus web app, and my user is assigned the admin role (so I should have all permissions). I can see the credentials in my .npmrc file

My registry value is still the npm-public group which combined the mirror and my local registry. I have ensured that the package.json of the module I am attempting to deploy has a "publishConfig" section that points to the url of the local registry (not the public group)

However, despite all of that, calling "npm publish" results in a 401 error...

Looking at the npm-debug.log, I can see it's attempting to call the HTTP PUT call to push the assembled tgz file to the registry, and this is returning a 401 error

I have enabled debug logging on the shiro package in the server, but I only ever see a single message thinking it needs authentication

2016-09-13 08:56:28,590+1000 DEBUG [qtp1257823896-4030] *UNKNOWN org.apache.shiro.web.filter.authc.BasicHttpAuthenticationFilter - Authentication required: sending 401 Authentication challenge response.

According to the documentation, I've done all I'm supposed to do (npm add user) but I am unable to successfully deploy an npm module to my local repository.

Are there additional options I need to use when calling npm publish? Are there additional settings I need to make to the hosted npm repository in my server that will allow me to publish to it? I pretty much created it using the default values. Have I missed a step that is preventing me from deploying to my hosted npm registry?

Any help would be greatly appreciated, as I am stuck at the moment.

Answer 1

As it turns out, I did not have the Npm Bearer Token Realm in my list of active realms. Once I moved it to Active, the publish completed successfully!

Answer 2

Additonally to @EdH's answer we discovered that the format of .npmrc has changed so base64 encoded _auth will not work anymore... and the token has to be created by logging into the repo.

old .npmrc

registry=https://host/repo
_auth=12afdjsljl123213

new .npmrc

//host/repo/:_authtoken=uuidOfToken

Answer 3

Additionally to @Daniel's answer, I discovered that when adding user credentials/logging into npm, you can't have a trailing slash on the registry url.

Bad:

npm adduser --registry=https://repo.localhost/repository/npm-internal/

Good:

npm adduser --registry=https://repo/repository/npm-internal

Also, if you're looking to automate the login (i.e. non-interactively), I used a good tool called npm-cli-login.

npm-cli-login -u admin -p admin123 -e [email protected] -r https://repo/repository/npm-internal

Answer 4

I realize that this post is a couple years old now, but as of struggling with this issue for many hours, I finally found what worked for me that I've not seen in many other places. The problem was that I was not specifying the _authToken within the .npmrc file. Adding this as shown below resolved the issue and I was able to successfully run npm commands without a 401 error.

.npmrc

registry=https://test.repo.com/repository/npm-group/
//test.repo.com/repository/npm-group/:_authToken=NpmToken.${NPM_TOKEN}