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Verdaccio 4 released !!!

· 7 min read

Verdaccio is a free open source javascript package proxy registry. It is fully compatible with pnpm, yarn and npm package management clients. It follows the CommonJS compliant package specifications.

You can install and upgrade to the latest version by following commands:

using npm

npm install -g verdaccio@4.0.0

or using Yarn

yarn global add verdaccio@4.0.0

or using pnpm

pnpm install -g verdaccio@4.0.0

You can find detailed installation instructions here

Why 'Freedom' ?​

Verdaccio originated from Sinopia almost three years ago and since then the Verdaccio Team maintaining and releasing major release every year. Since the fork, the project has evolved in many ways, making the project’s code base modern, easier to debug and more straightforward to contribute.

The name Freedom holds true meaning for Verdaccio@4.x release. Verdaccio is a strong community of many contributors and developers from across the world, providing an ideal platform for everyone to give control of their code. Also, Verdaccio@4.x is free from tech debt of legacy code and stands on design patterns of the modern era which consist React, Typescript, JWT, Docker & Kubernetes. We can call it Freedom in true sense.

Let's take a quick look at the life cycle and development of Verdaccio community:

  • Verdaccio (version 2 - Release name: Birth) - Focused on stability, code quality, improvement in architecture of the old Sinopia project and community development.

  • Verdaccio (version 3 - Release name: Hope) - Redesigned the user interface in React and introduced the simplicity of the plugins development. The Verdaccio Team and many contributors made the project almost bug free and robust. This was the time the project started to grow and other projects started using it.

Verdaccio@4.x is coming up with many exciting new CLI commands for package management, Fast and responsive user interface, security upgrades and easy deployments.

Excited?? Yes !!! Let's go !!

So what's changed? TL;DR​

New User Interface​

Verdaccio@4.x comes with a new shiny appealing user interface, providing more details to show and easy to navigate. We did major changes in Verdaccio web application and everything is designed from scratch.

verdaccio-main-page

New Search Process​

Verdaccio@3.x has a limited search functionality and it was implemented on the browser side. Verdaccio@4.x provides fast and quick search results from the backend.

new-search-process

Register Information​

The Register information is easily accessible and can be seen by clicking on information icon in header.

register-info-modal-image

Packages​

The new Package card provides more information about a package, easy to open issues and documentation link without navigating into package details.

Order: Verdaccio@4.x has basic support for package ordering from config.yaml. The package list can be sorted ascending & descending. Find out more

Detailed Page​

The new Detailed package in a more categorized manner for readme, dependencies, version and uplinks.

verdaccio-detail-page

Package Sidebar​

The Package Sidebar includes most relevant information from package metadata. You can open an issue, see Readme and download the package tarball. It also clearly shows the package's minimum requirements on node and npm.

Also, The package sidebar shows Author, Maintainers and Contributors in different sections. When you click on person avatar, you'll be able to contact that person via email.

New Browser Router​

Till, verdaccio@3.x we have Hash Router implementation on frontend application routes. We faced a lot of problem with hash router in the Readme section. The Readme also uses (#) hash for the heading tags and anchor elements.

In Verdaccio@4.x, we migrated the Hash Router to Browser Router with a more cleaner look. (No more hashes in URLs).

Unpublish Role​

Verdaccio@4.x improves package management by adding an access layer to publish and unpublish. Now you can have restrictions to some of the users for publishing and unpublishing. Find out more

Disable Gravatar​

Verdaccio uses Gravatar to show the images of authors, contributors and maintainers. Now, gravatar support can be disabled from Verdaccio config.yaml.

web:
  title: Verdaccio
  gravatar: false

In order to be fully offline, The fallback support is a generic user face SVG based on base64.

New CLI Commands​

We are really excited to add some npm cli commands to Verdaccio. Now you can use npm star, and npm profile.

npm star​

Now a user can mark their favorite package.

npm star [<package>..]

npm profile​

With npm profile, a user can change their profile settings.

Note: Verdaccio does not support two-factor authentication yet.

npm profile get [--json|--parseable] [<property>]
npm profile set [--json|--parseable] <property> <value>
npm profile set password

Check out more at https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/profile

JWT Token​

Verdaccio supports JSON Web Tokens for the authentication. The previous version of Verdaccio used AES token generator. The new JWT token standardizes the process and provides an additional mechanism for token generation. Verdaccio@4.x still supports the AES token generator.

Click here for more information on new JWT tokens

Docker Improvements​

There is no doubt that Docker has been a major breakthrough for this project, it's by far the most popular way to download Verdaccio, we have more than 4.200.000 downloads at this writing and for such reason, we care about improving the developer experience adding new features.

Please click here more information on the new Docker Image.

Drop Node 6 Support​

NodeJS 6 went to end of life on April 30, 2019. Verdaccio@4.x drops the support for Node 6 & npm 3. Now on, Node 8 & npm 5 will be the minimum requirement. Verdaccio@4.x also checks for the minimum node version. https://github.com/verdaccio/verdaccio/pull/968

Plugins​

Verdaccio extends its functionalities with a set of plugins. You can find detailed information in Plugins Documentation

Tech Updates​

Verdaccio 4 heavily relies on plugins and provides APIs for developers to build their own plugins. We introduced few major changes in the development environment to adapt code modularity, decoupling and typed system.

Now the main Verdaccio module is a powerful CLI to package management and a plugin system to introduce new functionalities.

Verdaccio ESLint config​

Now on, Verdaccio Team uses @verdaccio/eslint-config across all the repositories to maintain the same coding style.

Verdaccio Babel Preset​

As Babel@7 released in 2018, Verdaccio Team updated babel dependencies to the latest. We also created a central repository for the Babel preset @verdaccio/babel-preset

Verdaccio UI Plugin​

Verdaccio provides an easy configuration system to enable/disable of web application. Verdaccio is used as End-to-End(E2E) tooling system in many platforms and shipping UI along with Verdaccio is a non-beneficial overhead. So we separated the UI module and it's repository for simple & easy development and maintainability.

You can find UI repository here.

Meetup & Conferences​

Since Verdaccio@3.x release, Verdaccio contributors are actively participating in community activities, conferences, meetup and on twitter.

Trusted by Many​

Verdaccio Team is very happy to share that following projects are using Verdaccio as their End-to-End (E2E) testing tool.

New to Verdaccio / FAQ / Contact / Troubleshoot​

We welcome you in Verdaccio community and we look forward for your feedback and contribution to the project.

If you have any issue you can try the following options, do no desist to ask or check our issues database, perhaps someone has asked already what you are looking for.