Installing NPM Packages Behind Proxy ​

On a recent assignment, I needed to install npm behind a corporate proxy. I had already set the environment variables HTTP_PROXY and HTTPS_PROXY. Other command line utilities, like ruby gems, recognized these environment variables. Npm did not.

After some googling, I found the following way to configure the proxy for npm.

# npm
npm config set proxy <http://127.0.0.1:7890>
npm config set https-proxy <http://127.0.0.1:7890>

# yarn
yarn config set proxy <http://127.0.0.1:7890>
yarn config set https-proxy <http://127.0.0.1:7890>

# npm
npm config set proxy <http://127.0.0.1:7890>
npm config set https-proxy <http://127.0.0.1:7890>

# yarn
yarn config set proxy <http://127.0.0.1:7890>
yarn config set https-proxy <http://127.0.0.1:7890>

If you need to specify credentials, they can be passed in the url using the following syntax.

[<http://user_name:password@proxy.company.com:8080>](<http://user_name:password@proxy.company.com:8080/>)

[<http://user_name:password@proxy.company.com:8080>](<http://user_name:password@proxy.company.com:8080/>)

Further exploration of the npm config documentation showed that the npm config set command sets the proxy configuration in your .npmrc file. You can also set the proxy configuration as a command line argument or environment variable.

Configuration parameters can be specified using -- when executing npm. So the proxy could also be specified as follows.

npm --https-proxy=http://proxy.company.com:8080 -g install karma

npm --https-proxy=http://proxy.company.com:8080 -g install karma

To pass configurattion parameters to npm as environment variables, they must be prefixed with npm_config_. The proxy configuration could be set with environment variables as follows.

export npm_config_proxy <http://proxy.company.com:8080>
export npm_config_https_proxy <http://proxy.company.com:8080>

export npm_config_proxy <http://proxy.company.com:8080>
export npm_config_https_proxy <http://proxy.company.com:8080>