Publish an NPM package to GitLab package registry - gitlab

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I followed the instructions in the GitLab docs to publish my project as a package to the project's registry. Here is my .gitlab-ci.yml file:
image: node:18
stages:
- publish
publish:
stage: publish
rules:
- if: $CI_COMMIT_BRANCH == $CI_DEFAULT_BRANCH
script:
- echo "//${CI_SERVER_HOST}/api/v4/projects/${CI_PROJECT_ID}/packages/npm/:_authToken=${CI_JOB_TOKEN}">.npmrc
- npm publish
When I run this pipeline, it gives the following error:
npm ERR! code ENEEDAUTH
npm ERR! need auth This command requires you to be logged in to https://registry.npmjs.org/
npm ERR! need auth You need to authorize this machine using `npm adduser`
npm ERR! A complete log of this run can be found in:
npm ERR! /root/.npm/_logs/2023-02-16T19_08_00_397Z-debug-0.log
Why does it say I need to authenticate with registry.npmjs.org? I am trying to publish to my GitLab package registry, not to NPM. More importantly, how do I correctly authenticate with GitLab and publish my NPM package to the project's registry?
More Details
I tried adding this line at the top of my script block:
- echo "registry=https://${CI_SERVER_HOST}/api/v4/projects/${CI_PROJECT_ID}/packages/npm/">.npmrc
This gives the following error:
npm notice Publishing to https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/<project-id>/packages/npm/ with tag latest and default access
npm ERR! code E403
npm ERR! 403 403 Forbidden - PUT https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/<project-id>/packages/npm/npm-publish-gitlab
npm ERR! 403 In most cases, you or one of your dependencies are requesting
npm ERR! 403 a package version that is forbidden by your security policy, or
npm ERR! 403 on a server you do not have access to.
npm ERR! A complete log of this run can be found in:
npm ERR! /root/.npm/_logs/2023-02-16T19_26_48_321Z-debug-0.log
If I also change image: node:18 to image: node:14, it works. So something appears to have changed since nodejs 14 that breaks the gitlab pipeline implementation. Any ideas what it might be?

Answer 1

It looks like you're missing a definition to publish your package to the internal registry.
This can be done in the package.json (although I don't think there's a convenient way of using environment variables there):
"publishConfig": {
"registry":"http://my-internal-registry.local"
}
or directly in the .npmrc:
registry=https://${CI_SERVER_HOST}/api/v4/projects/${CI_PROJECT_ID}/packages/npm/
this can also be limited to a specific scope:
#myscope:registry=https://${CI_SERVER_HOST}/api/v4/projects/${CI_PROJECT_ID}/packages/npm/