Best Practices

The following guide is a list of the best practices collected and that we usually recommend to all users. Do not take this guide as mandatory, you might pick some of them according your needs.

Feel free to suggest your best practices to the Verdaccio community.

Private Registry

You can add users and manage which users can access which packages.

It is recommended that you define a prefix for your private packages, for example local-* or scoped @my-company/*, so all your private things will look like this: local-foo. This way you can clearly separate public packages from private ones.

 packages:
   '@my-company/*':
     access: $all
     publish: $authenticated
    'local-*':
     access: $all
     publish: $authenticated
   '@*/*':
     access: $all
     publish: $authenticated
   '**':
     access: $all
     publish: $authenticated

Always remember, the order of packages access is important, packages are matched always top to bottom.

Using public packages from npmjs.org

If a package doesn't exist in the storage, the server will try to fetch it from npmjs.org. If npmjs.org is down, it serves packages from the cache pretending that no other packages exist. Verdaccio will download only what's needed (requested by clients), and this information will be cached, so if the client requests the same thing a second time it can be served without asking npmjs.org for it.

Example:

If you successfully request express@4.0.1 from the server once, you'll be able to do it again (with all of it's dependencies) any time, even if npmjs.org is down. Though note that express@4.0.0 will not be downloaded until it's actually needed by somebody. And if npmjs.org is offline, the server will say that only express@4.0.1 (what's in the cache) is published, but nothing else.

Override public packages

If you want to use a modified version of some public package foo, you can just publish it to your local server, so when your type npm install foo, it'll consider installing your version.

There's two options here:

1. You want to create a separate fork and stop synchronizing with public version.

   If you want to do that, you should modify your configuration file so Verdaccio won't make requests regarding this package to npmjs anymore. Add a separate entry for this package to config.yaml and remove npmjs from proxy list and restart the server.

   packages:
     '@my-company/*':
       access: $all
       publish: $authenticated
       # comment it out or leave it empty
       # proxy:

   When you publish your package locally, you should probably start with a version string higher than the existing package so it won't conflict with that package in the cache.

2. You want to temporarily use your version, but return to the public one as soon as it's updated.

   In order to avoid version conflicts, you should use a custom pre-release suffix of the next patch version. For example, if a public package has version 0.1.2, you can upload 0.1.3-my-temp-fix.

    npm version 0.1.3-my-temp-fix
    npm publish --tag fix --registry http://localhost:4873

   This way your package will be used until its original maintainer updates his public package to 0.1.3.

Security

Security starts in your environment.

Additional reading:

• 10 npm Security Best Practices and following the steps outlined there.
• Avoiding npm substitution attacks
• Dependency Confusion: When Are Your npm Packages Vulnerable?
• Practical Mitigations For Dependency Confusion Attack

  Feel free to attach here new useful articles to improve the security.

Strong package access with $authenticated

By default all packages you publish in Verdaccio are accessible for all users. We recommend protecting your registry from external non-authorized users by updating the access property of your packages to $authenticated.

packages:
  '@my-company/*':
    access: $authenticated
    publish: $authenticated
  '@*/*':
    access: $authenticated
    publish: $authenticated
  '**':
    access: $authenticated
    publish: $authenticated

That way, nobody can access your registry unless they are authorized, and private packages won't be displayed in the web interface.

Remove proxy to increase security at private packages

After a clean installation, by default all packages will be resolved to the default uplink (the public registry npmjs).

packages:
  '@*/*':
    access: $authenticated
    publish: $authenticated
    proxy: npmjs
  '**':
    access: $authenticated
    publish: $authenticated
    proxy: npmjs

This means that even if a private package like @my-company/auth is published locally, the server will look up at the public registry. If that's not your intention, remove the proxy property and use a configuration like this one:

packages:
  '@my-company/*':
    access: $authenticated
    publish: $authenticated
    unpublish: $authenticated
  '@*/*':
    access: $authenticated
    publish: $authenticated
    proxy: npmjs
  '**':
    access: $authenticated
    publish: $authenticated
    proxy: npmjs

This will avoid downloading tarballs, and merge metadata needlessly from external registries.

Server

Secured Connections

Using HTTPS is a common recommendation. For this reason we recommend reading the SSL section to make Verdaccio secure, or alternatively using an HTTPS reverse proxy on top of Verdaccio.

Expiring Tokens

Since verdaccio@3.x the tokens have no expiration date. For such reason we introduced in the next verdaccio@4.x the JWT feature PR#896

security:
  api:
    jwt:
      sign:
        expiresIn: 15d
        notBefore: 0
  web:
    sign:
      expiresIn: 1h

Using this configuration will override the current system and you will be able to control how long the token will live.

Using JWT also improves the performance with authentication plugins. The old system will perform an unpackage and validate the credentials on every request, while JWT will rely on the token signature instead, avoiding the overhead for the plugin.

As a side note, be aware at npmjs and the legacy verdaccio token never expires** unless you invalidate manually.

Rate Limit

Since version v5.4.0 critical endpoints have enabled by default rate limit. The following commands are considered user endpoints:

• npm token all variants
• npm login/adduser
• npm profile all supported variants
• User website /sec/login endpoint.

The previous list of endpoints are limited to 100 request peer 15 minutes which is enough for a basic usage, if you need to increase this levels please check the userRateLimit configuration options.

userRateLimit:
  windowMs: 50000 <- (minutes * 60 * 1000)
  max: 1000 (number of request peer windowMs)

The website endpoints as, search, packages, sidebar, and detail are protected by default to 5,000 request peer 2 minutes, also configurable via web ui options.

We recommend customize this values to those that addapt your needs to avoid any kind of (DDoS) or brute-force attack to the critical endpoints.

The CLI API endpoints used by eg npm install are not limited at this point since are not considered critical, but if you find any good reason please open a discussion.