GitLab NPM Registry [PREMIUM]

Introduced in GitLab Premium 11.7.

With the GitLab NPM Registry, every project can have its own space to store NPM packages.

NOTE: Note: Only scoped packages are supported.

NOTE: Note: As @group/subgroup/project is not a valid NPM package name, publishing a package within a subgroup is not supported yet.

Enabling the NPM Registry

NOTE: Note: This option is available only if your GitLab administrator has enabled support for the NPM registry.[PREMIUM ONLY]

After the NPM registry is enabled, it will be available for all new projects by default. To enable it for existing projects, or if you want to disable it:

1. Navigate to your project's Settings > General > Permissions.
2. Find the Packages feature and enable or disable it.
3. Click on Save changes for the changes to take effect.

You should then be able to see the Packages section on the left sidebar.

Before proceeding to authenticating with the GitLab NPM Registry, you should get familiar with the package naming convention.

Package naming convention

Only packages that have the same path as the project are supported. For example:

Project	Package	Supported
foo/bar	@foo/bar	Yes
gitlab-org/gitlab-ce	@gitlab-org/gitlab-ce	Yes
gitlab-org/gitlab-ce	@foo/bar	No

Now, you can configure your project to authenticate with the GitLab NPM Registry.

Authenticating to the GitLab NPM Registry

If a project is private or you want to upload an NPM package to GitLab, credentials will need to be provided for authentication. Support is available only for OAuth tokens.

CAUTION: 2FA not supported: Authentication for personal access tokens is not yet supported (#9140). If you have 2FA enabled, you won't be able to authenticate to the GitLab NPM Registry.

Authenticating with an OAuth token

To authenticate with an OAuth token, add a corresponding section to your .npmrc file:

; Set URL for your scoped packages.
; For example package with name `@foo/bar` will use this URL for download
@foo:registry=https://gitlab.com/api/v4/packages/npm/

; Add the OAuth token for the scoped packages URL. This will allow you to download
; `@foo/` packages from private projects.
//gitlab.com/api/v4/packages/npm/:_authToken=<your_oauth_token>

; Add OAuth token for uploading to the registry. Replace <your_project_id>
; with the project you want your package to be uploaded to.
//gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/<your_project_id>/packages/npm/:_authToken=<your_oauth_token>

Replace <your_project_id> with your project ID which can be found on the home page of your project and <your_oauth_token> with your OAuth token.

If you have a self-hosted GitLab installation, replace gitlab.com with your domain name.

You should now be able to download and upload NPM packages to your project.

Uploading packages

Before you will be able to upload a package, you need to specify the registry for NPM. To do this, add the following section to the bottom of package.json:

  "publishConfig": {
    "@foo:registry":"https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/<your_project_id>/packages/npm/"
  }

Replace <your_project_id> with your project ID, which can be found on the home page of your project, and replace @foo with your own scope.

If you have a self-hosted GitLab installation, replace gitlab.com with your domain name.

Once you have enabled it and set up authentication, you can upload an NPM package to your project:

npm publish

You can then navigate to your project's Packages page and see the uploaded packages or even delete them.

Uploading a package with the same version twice

If you upload a package with a same name and version twice, GitLab will show both packages in the UI, but the GitLab NPM Registry will expose the most recent one as it supports only one package per version for npm install.