Selecting another npm registry via .npmrc

To configure the behavior of npm, a special file called .npmrc is used. We’ve already briefly touched on this file in Chapter 3, Choosing a Package Manager. This file can be used not only to determine the source of the packages but also to define where to publish to.

A simple modification might look as follows:

.npmrc

; Lines starting with a semicolon or
# with a hash symbol are comments
registry=https://mycustomregistry.example.org

This way, all installations and publish attempts will be performed at https://mycustomregistry.example.org instead of the official registry located at https://registry.npmjs.org.

Quite often, this extreme approach is unnecessary or even unwanted. Instead, you might only want to use another registry for a subset of the packages. In the most common case, the subset is already defined by a scope.

Let’s say the @foo scope that we used in the previous section with the @foo/bar package...