Custom Node module management using private npm registry configured in Nexus repository

When we are developing software applications, we design reusable components to apply the power and benefit of reusable. Reuse is still an emerging discipline. It appears in many different forms from ad-hoc reuse to systematic reuse, and from white-box reuse to black-box reuse.It’s more similar to dependency/package/library management in programming languages.Several package managers are

• Spring Boot/Java : Maven
• PHP : composer
• Node.js : npm
• Python : pip

During my work at organization I had to work with multiple programming languages to build specific micro-services. There I designed custom modules based on different languages to use them for common purposes such as logging,alarming,specific database integrations,message publishers etc.Those modules has the ability to be integrated with any project which based on corresponding programming language.User can easily use them through a package manager.The re-usability of modules has following advantages.

• Easily can be integrated
• Customized for special purposes
• Common format can be maintained through the organization
• Less effort than developing
• A best practice
• More user friendly

Therefore we can publish those custom modules in above mentioned package managers in private so those who are in a certain organization or group will be able to use them.There are several platforms that can be used to publish and consume those custom modules and here I used Nexus Repository since it has the capability to configure for several tech stacks such as maven,npm,composer,nuget etc.

Nexus Repository is an open source repository allows you to proxy, collect, and manage your packages/dependencies.Here I’m going to show you how we can configure a private npm registry in Sonatype Nexus Repository which is free and how to publish and consume custom Node.js modules in your Node.js projects.

The example shows how to locally host the application and use it and the tech stack that gonna be used is

• Docker
• Sonatype Nexus Repository
• npm
• Node.js

Nexus Repository integration locally

First you have to run docker on your local machine,for that Docker Desktop can be used.Install and run docker desktop from below link.

https://www.docker.com/products/docker-desktop

Make sure it has been installed correctly using below command and it shows the current version of application.

docker -v

Sonatype provides the docker image for Nexus which can be easily pulled locally using the following pull command

docker pull sonatype/nexus3

Once the image is pulled. To run, just execute the following command below:

docker run --rm -it -p 8395:8081/tcp sonatype/nexus3:latest

This brings up the container running our instance of Nexus. To try it out, open http://localhost:8395 in the browser, and, you will get a window shown as below.

You can find the admin password for login inside the nexus container.

docker container ls --all

docker exec -ti b426554e61ed sh

It is available at /nexus-data/admin.password file.

Sign by giving that password for user admin.Then you can change the default password and give a new one since every Nexus user around the world knows what the default username and password are.

Configure Nexus for npm registry

Nexus exposes a group of repositories which is internally a combination of our private repository and a proxy to the public NPM registry.We can get and store customized node modules/dependencies in a private repository and public repository is used to get already available node modules(access all the publicly available repositories from the NPM registry).Whenever we consume these public packages, they get cached in the proxy.

Since, when we want to install a new private or public npm package, we point our projects registry to the group so that it can install any package necessary . And, to create or to update an existing repository point the publish action to the hosted repository .

This is why we see a default set of group/hosted/proxy repositories combination created for us when we load Nexus for the first time.

1. User Creation

Let’s create a user for our application.Create custom roles and only assign it to users based on their need

Next, let us prevent unauthorized users from accessing our server, click on Anonymous under Security and uncheck the option to allow accessing the server:

2. Volume management

Due to the stateless nature in docker containers we have to store data in a volume so that we can use the same configured data again and again without loosing them.

First, let us create a directory in which we will be placing all the nexus-data generated with respect to this example.D:/nexus-data directory is available to store data.

This is the folder which we will be using as a temporary volume for our Nexus image. We now need to provide the path to our volume while issuing the run command for the container:

docker run --rm -it -p 8395:8081 -v D:/nexus-data:/nexus-data sonatype/nexus3

The highlighted part above is the one which makes all the difference, we are specifying the complete path to our nexus-data directory and we are mounting it to the default data directory called nexus-data within the Nexus container. Additional properties and configurations are listed here.

Once we run the command listed, we see different folders created under the nexus-data folder that we created.Any and all changes that we make in Nexus now would get synced back to this folder. If you are curious, create the npmuser with admin role again, stop the container and restart it. The newly created user would be persisted as expected.

3. Creating Blob

Let’s create a Blob store which is a logical partition that we want to enforce for our different project type (we want to segregate our npm binaries and maven binaries to avoid any conflicts).Any package that we upload now to that blob would get persisted in the volume under the folder associated with it.

4. Creating Hosted Repository

Hosted repository is used as the private repository to store private node packages.Since this repository is private to access it user need a auth token.We will talk about it in the end of the article.

To create a hosted repository, go to the Settings page > Repository > Repositories > Create Repository.There you can find the certain type of repository needs to be configured.Here we considered only npm repositories.

select the npm(hosted) option and configure it as shown in below image.

5. Creating Proxy Repository

Since we created a private repo now we need to setup a public npm repository after that we can add both hosted and proxy repositories into a group. Therefore we’ll be able to use both of them through a group.When we want to add a package first it’ll looking for the private one and if it is not available there it will looking for the public one.Configure it as below.

give the proxy Location as https://registry.npmjs.org

6. Creating Group Repository

Creating a group repository as described earlier is to combine the hosted and the proxy repository which makes the reads much easier. Let us create the npm (group) and configured it as below.

7. Pushing binaries to nexus

Let us first create a sample NodeJS project with a blank index.js file and push it to our hosted repository.Create a folder and add index.js and package.json files there.You can add your customized logic inside the Index.js file and for package.js add as following.

We need to add additional realms to enable npm publish feature. To enable the additional realms, go to Settings > Security > Realms.

Add the npm Bearer Token Realm and save the changes. Additional information about the realms is available here.

Then type the below command.Instead of admin user use the user (npmuser)that we created in the beginning.

Then use the command npm publishand you’ll see the following result.

8. Pulling Binaries from Nexus

First we have to logout from the private repository and log into the group repository.By logging into group we’ll be able to use both custom and default npm packages.

npm logout --registry=http://localhost:8395/repository/npm-private/

Let’s create another node project to test this and add plugin-log dependency that we developed.

mkdir test-project&& test-project
npm init -y

Then run npm install and you can see following result in your node-modules folder.

Therefore you can use it as a node package for your use cases.By this way you can add reusable components to the nexus repository and by maintaining a proper versioning the features can be added.

Conclusion

This article only covered some basics on how to use Nexus as a repository manager. Although we run the container and mount the volume to a local directory, it is highly recommended that you try out the above on a cloud provider of your choice. Keep in mind that in the case of cloud providers (or self-hosting) you would need to back-up the volume for disaster recovery.

Reference : https://levelup.gitconnected.com/deploying-private-npm-packages-to-nexus-a16722cc8166