NPM: how to specify registry to publish in the command line? - npm

Question

I'm testing a new version of our npm packages registry. I'd like to run a job in our CI server specifying a registry different of the default.
I tried to execute npm publish --registry "http://nexus.dsv.myhost/nexus/repository/npmjs-registry but it didn't work. It was published to the default registry.
How do I specify a different registry while running npm publish. It is a scoped package.

Answer 1

There's multiple ways to accomplish this.
use npm config to set the registry globally:
npm config set registry http://nexus.dsv.myhost/nexus/repository/npmjs
use npm config to set the registry for the package scope:
npm config set #<your scope here>:registry http://nexus.dsv.myhost/nexus/repository/npmjs
configure your package.json with a publish config:
{
...
"publishConfig": {
"registry": "http://nexus.dsv.myhost/nexus/repository/npmjs"
},
...
}
use npmrc to configure the registry
registry=http://nexus.dsv.myhost/nexus/repository/npmjs

Answer 2

It sounds like you have a scope-specific registry configured somewhere in your npm config.
npm will merge your global, local and CLI-provided config. But any scope-specific config will take precedence over unscoped config regardless of where each of them are defined.
For example, if you have #myscope:registry=xyz in your ~/.npmrc file, that will take precedence over --registry=abc provided on the CLI, because a scope-specific registry always overrides the unscoped registry.
However, you can also pass a scope-specific registry on the CLI itself like this:
npm publish --#myscope:registry=http://nexus.dsv.myhost/nexus/repository/npmjs-registry
Note that because of how nopt (which is what npm uses under the hood to parse the CLI options) parses freeform switches, the = sign here is required. If you use a space instead, it won't work as expected.