Have your private npm repo, and diskspace too!

With the ever expanding disk requirements of the public npm repository and the issues with constantly replicating the database (replication stopping for no apparent reason, bandwidth limitations.. etc ), something needed to be done.

Enter npm_proxy.

npm_proxy runs from squid proxy using the "url_rewrite_program" option.

When it sees a http request for registry.npmjs.org, it fires of a LWP request to that URL, if the URL returns 200, squid will process the connection normally. If the LWP request sees a 404, it will re-write the URL to point it at an internal couchdb. This allows for pushing of your private npm packages to your internal repo with out having to have all the dependent packages installed as well.

Say we have a package "potatosausage" that only exists in our private repo:

npm install potatosausage
 - > squid sees the package potatosausage doesn't exist on npmjs.org
 - > squid sends a redirect to internal repo
 - > npm continues along its happy way

url_write_program /usr/local/bin/npm_proxy.pl

registry = http://registry.npmjs.org
proxy = http://proxyserver:3128