[rush] publish tries to upload to default NPM registry when a different registry is listed

[dryzhkov]

Is this a feature or a bug?

• Feature
• Bug

Please describe the actual behavior.
'rush publish -p' tries to upload packages to registry.npmjs.org instead of a different registry that's been configured in .npmrc and shrinkwrap.yml

If the issue is a bug, how can we reproduce it? Please provide detailed steps and include a GitHub branch if applicable. Your issue will get resolved faster if you can make it easy to investigate.

1. Set a custom (non-default) registry inside .npmrc and shrinkwrap.yml
2. Run rush publish -p
3. Observe: the command fails with the following error message

npm ERR! 401 Unauthorized - PUT https://registry.npmjs.org/my-app - You must be logged in to publish packages.

What is the expected behavior?
Packages should be published to registry specified in step 1

If this is a bug, please provide the tool version, Node.js version, and OS.

• Tool: rush
• Tool Version: 5.17
• Node Version: 10.16.0
  • Is this a LTS version? yes
  • Have you tested on a LTS version? yes
• OS: macOS 10.15.1

[iclanton]

To publish to a different package feed, use the --registry <registry> parameter to rush publish. .npmrc files allow multiple registries to be specified, so if you're publishing to something other than the default npmjs.org registry, Rush uses an explicit command-line parameter.

[dryzhkov]

Confirmed --registry parameter solves this issue. However, just to clarify my .npmrc config only has 1 (non-default) feed. It seems like rush should respect what's inside .npmrc, otherwise, what is the purpose for having this config?

[octogonz]

@dryzhkov I believe what you're proposing would be inconsistent with how NPM's npm publish interprets the .npmrc file.

Longer term we want to eliminate most of the command-line options for rush publish and instead move them into config files (see #904). But we would use a Rush configuration file (e.g. verson-policies.json) since the NPM schemas are somewhat vaguely specified and not validated very well, and they are interpreted differently by different package managers.

[dryzhkov]

@octogonz - could you explain why this would be inconsistent with npm publish? If .npmrc has registry=https://mycustomregistry.example.org NPM will publish packages to that registry and not the default (https://registry.npmjs.org). On the other hand, rush seems to try to publish to the default registry regardless of what .npmrc has in it and the only way to modify that behavior is to pass --registry <custom-registry> as stated above.

[octogonz]

could you explain why this would be inconsistent with npm publish? If .npmrc has registry=https://mycustomregistry.example.org NPM will publish packages to that registry and not the default (https://registry.npmjs.org).

Oh? If that's true, then I'd be okay with changing Rush's behavior to use the default registry specified in .npmrc.

[octogonz]

Also, note that PR #1602 is introducing a new file .npmrc-publish that would be used instead of .npmrc when publishing. So the fix would need to support that.

@dryzhkov would you want to make a PR?

[dryzhkov]

I can def give it a try but it might take some time for me to get to it. Maybe #1602 will get merged in the meantime. Is apps/rush-lib/src/cli/actions/PublishAction.ts a good starting point for change?

[octogonz]

Is apps/rush-lib/src/cli/actions/PublishAction.ts a good starting point for change?

Yup. And if you need some more direct help figuring out the code, you can chat directly with the Rush developers on Gitter.