verdaccio/website/docs/best-practices.md

id	title
best	Best Practices

The following guide is a list of the best practices collected and that we usually recommend to all users. Do not take this guide as mandatory, you might pick some of them according your needs.

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Feel free to suggest your best practices with the Verdaccio community.

Private Registry

You can add users and manage which users can access which packages.

It is recommended that you define a prefix for your private packages, for example local-* or scoped @my-company/*, so all your private things will look like this: local-foo. This way you can clearly separate public packages from private ones.

 packages:
   '@my-company/*':
     access: $all
     publish: $authenticated
    'local-*':
     access: $all
     publish: $authenticated
   '@*/*':
     access: $all
     publish: $authenticated
   '**':
     access: $all
     publish: $authenticated

Always remember, the order of packages access is important, packages are mached always top to bottom.

Using public packages from npmjs.org

If some package doesn't exist in the storage, server will try to fetch it from npmjs.org. If npmjs.org is down, it serves packages from cache pretending that no other packages exist. Verdaccio will download only what's needed (= requested by clients), and this information will be cached, so if client will ask the same thing second time, it can be served without asking npmjs.org for it.

Example:

If you successfully request express@4.0.1 from this server once, you'll able to do that again (with all it's dependencies) anytime even if npmjs.org is down. But say express@4.0.0 will not be downloaded until it's actually needed by somebody. And if npmjs.org is offline, this server would say that only express@4.0.1 (= only what's in the cache) is published, but nothing else.

Override public packages

If you want to use a modified version of some public package foo, you can just publish it to your local server, so when your type npm install foo, it'll consider installing your version.

There's two options here:

1. You want to create a separate fork and stop synchronizing with public version.

   If you want to do that, you should modify your configuration file so verdaccio won't make requests regarding this package to npmjs anymore. Add a separate entry for this package to config.yaml and remove npmjs from proxy list and restart the server.

   packages:
     '@my-company/*':
       access: $all
       publish: $authenticated
       # comment it out or leave it empty
       # proxy:
   

   When you publish your package locally, you should probably start with version string higher than existing one, so it won't conflict with existing package in the cache.

2. You want to temporarily use your version, but return to public one as soon as it's updated.

   In order to avoid version conflicts, you should use a custom pre-release suffix of the next patch version. For example, if a public package has version 0.1.2, you can upload 0.1.3-my-temp-fix.

    npm version 0.1.3-my-temp-fix
    npm --publish --tag fix --registry http://localhost:4873
   

   This way your package will be used until its original maintainer updates his public package to 0.1.3.

Security

The security starts in your environment, for such thing we totally recommend read 10 npm Security Best Practices and follow the recommendation.

Package Access

By default all packages are you publish in Verdaccio are accessible for all public, we totally recommend protect your registry from external non authorized users updating access property to $authenticated.

packages:
  '@my-company/*':
    access: $authenticated
    publish: $authenticated
  '@*/*':
    access: $authenticated
    publish: $authenticated
  '**':
    access: $authenticated
    publish: $authenticated

In that way, nobody will take advance of your registry unless is authorized and private packages won't be displayed in the User Interface.

Server

Secured Connections

Using HTTPS is a common recomendation, for such reason we recommend read the SSL section to make Verdaccio secure or using a HTTPS reverse proxy on top of Verdaccio.

Expiring Tokens

In verdaccio@3.x the tokens have no expiration date. For such reason we introduced in the next verdaccio@4.x the JWT feature PR#896

security:
  api:
    jwt:
      sign:
        expiresIn: 15d
        notBefore: 0
  web:
    sign:
      expiresIn: 7d

Using this configuration will override the current system and you will be able to control how long the token will live.

Using JWT also improves the performance with authentication plugins, the old system will perform an unpackage and validating the credentials in each request, while JWT will rely on the token signature avoiding the overhead for the plugin.

As a side note, at npmjs the token never expires.