Configuring npm for Your Org

The npm CLI is configurable! Learn more about configuring npm.

This page will teach you how to configure your npm for your Organization's scope and plan. Specifically, it will show you how:

• to make all new packages default to your Organization's scope
• to make all new packages have a default access, either public or private

In order to configure your npm, you'll need npm installed. If you need help installing npm, check out this doc.

Configuring npm for Your Scope

If you intend on publishing packages with your Organization scope more often that not, you may want to add your Organization scope to your global .npmrc file. Learn more about the .npmrc file.

To set your Organization scope globally for your instance of the npm CLI, use this command:

npm config set scope <org_scope> --global

If you'd like to do it just for a single package, remove the --global flag. Learn more about the CLI config command.

Once you issue this command, all packages that you create with npm init will be scoped to your Organization scope.

To verify this, create a new package with npm init. Open the generated package.json and view the name property. If you successfully configured npm, you should see your Organization's scope preceding the packages name in the name property.

For packages you do not want to publish with the Organization's scope, you can manually edit the generated package.json, removing the Organization scope from the name field.

Configuring npm for Your Org Plan

By default, any scoped package is published as private. However, if you have an Org that does not have the Private Packages feature, npm publish will fail unless you pass the access flag. (Learn more about publishing scoped packages).

This can be tedious if you have to do it all the time. If you know that a package will be public, you can set this in your per package .npmrc by issuing the following command:

npm config set access public

This command will pass --access public to every npm publish command that you issue for that package. You can also set this globally, similar to the above example about setting scope, by passing the --global flag to the command.

Setting the access property in your global .npmrc will affect all packages, including packages that are scoped to your Organization, as well as your personal user scope.

Be careful with this! You don't want to accidentally publish a private package as a public one.