Verdaccio

What is Verdaccio ?

Verdaccio is a simple, zero-config-required local private npm registry. No need for an entire database just to get started! Verdaccio comes out of the box with its own tiny database, and the ability to proxy other registries (eg. npmjs.org), caching the downloaded modules along the way. For those looking to extend their storage capabilities, Verdaccio supports various community-made plugins to hook into services such as Amazon’s s3, Google Cloud Storage or create your own plugin.

Verdaccio Features

Use private packages

If you want to use all benefits of npm package system in your company without sending all code to the public, and use your private packages just as easy as public ones.

Cache npmjs.org registry

If you have more than one server you want to install packages on, you might want to use this to decrease latency (presumably “slow” npmjs.org will be connected to only once per package/version) and provide limited failover (if npmjs.org is down, we might still find something useful in the cache) or avoid issues like How one developer just broke Node, Babel and thousands of projects in 11 lines of JavaScript, Many packages suddenly disappeared or Registry returns 404 for a package I have installed before.

Link multiple registries

If you use multiples registries in your organization and need to fetch packages from multiple sources in one single project you might take advance of the uplinks feature with Verdaccio, chaining multiple registries and fetching from one single endpoint.

Override public packages

If you want to use a modified version of some 3rd-party package (for example, you found a bug, but maintainer didn’t accept pull request yet), you can publish your version locally under the same name. See in detail here.

E2E Testing

Verdaccio has proved to be a lightweight registry that can be booted in a couple of seconds, fast enough for any CI. Many open source projects use verdaccio for end to end testing, to mention some examples, create-react-app, mozilla neutrino, pnpm, storybook, babel.js, angular-cli or docusaurus. You can read more in here.

Furthermore, here few examples how to start:

• e2e-ci-example-gh-actions
• verdaccio-end-to-end-tests
• verdaccio-fork

Install Verdaccio

Install with npm:

npm install --location=global verdaccio@next

With yarn

yarn global add verdaccio@next

With pnpm

pnpm i -g verdaccio@next

or

docker pull verdaccio/verdaccio:nightly-master

or with helm official chart.

helm repo add verdaccio https://charts.verdaccio.org
helm repo update
helm install verdaccio/verdaccio

Furthermore, you can read the Debugging Guidelines and the Docker Examples for more advanced development.

Plugins

You can develop your own plugins with the verdaccio generator. Installing Yeoman is required.

npm install --location=global yo
npm install --location=global generator-verdaccio-plugin

Learn more here how to develop plugins. Share your plugins with the community.

Get Started

Run in your terminal

verdaccio

You would need set some npm configuration, this is optional.

npm set registry http://localhost:4873/

For one-off commands or to avoid setting the registry globally:

NPM_CONFIG_REGISTRY=http://localhost:4873 npm i

Now you can navigate to http://localhost:4873/ where your local packages will be listed and can be searched.

Warning: Verdaccio does not currently support PM2’s cluster mode, running it with cluster mode may cause unknown behavior.

Publishing

1. create a user and log in

npm adduser --registry http://localhost:4873

if you use HTTPS, add an appropriate CA information (“null” means get CA list from OS)

npm set ca null

2. publish your package

npm publish --registry http://localhost:4873

This will prompt you for user credentials which will be saved on the verdaccio server.

Docker

Below are the most commonly needed information, every aspect of Docker and verdaccio is documented separately

docker pull verdaccio/verdaccio:nightly-master

Available as tags.

Running verdaccio using Docker

To run the docker container:

docker run -it --rm --name verdaccio -p 4873:4873 verdaccio/verdaccio

Docker examples are available in this repository.

Compatibility

Verdaccio aims to support all features of a standard npm client that make sense to support in private repository. Unfortunately, it isn’t always possible.

Basic features

• Installing packages (npm install, npm upgrade, etc.) - supported
• Publishing packages (npm publish) - supported

Advanced package control

• Unpublishing packages (npm unpublish) - supported
• Tagging (npm tag) - supported
• Deprecation (npm deprecate) - supported

User management

• Registering new users (npm adduser {newuser}) - supported
• Change password (npm profile set password) - supported
• Transferring ownership (npm owner add {user} {pkg}) - not supported, PR-welcome
• Token (npm token) - supported

Miscellany

• Searching (npm search) - supported (cli / browser)
• Ping (npm ping) - supported
• Starring (npm star, npm unstar, npm stars) - supported

Security

• npm/yarn audit - supported