Verdaccio-GitLab

Use GitLab Community Edition as authentication provider for the private npm registry Verdaccio, the sinopia fork.

The main goal and differences from other sinopia/verdaccio plugins are the following:

• no admin token required
• user authenticates with Personal Access Token
• access & publish packages depending on user rights in gitlab

This is experimental!

Use it

You need at least node version 8.x.x, codename carbon.

git clone https://github.com/bufferoverflow/verdaccio-gitlab.git
cd verdaccio-gitlab
yarn install
yarn start

NOTE: Define http_proxy environment variable if you are behind a proxy.

Verdaccio is now up and running. In order the see this plugin in action, you can use the following Verdaccio configuration in your ~/.config/verdaccio/config.yaml.

# Verdaccio storage location relative to $HOME/.config/verdaccio
storage: ./storage

listen:
  - 0.0.0.0:4873

auth:
  gitlab:
    url: https://gitlab.com

uplinks:
  npmjs:
    url: https://registry.npmjs.org/

packages:
  '@*/*':
    # scoped packages
    access: $all
    publish: $authenticated
    proxy: npmjs
    gitlab: true

  '**':
    access: $all
    publish: $authenticated
    proxy: npmjs
    gitlab: true

# Log level can be changed to info, http etc. for less verbose output
logs:
  - {type: stdout, format: pretty, level: debug}

Restart Verdaccio and authenticate into it with your credentials

• Username: GitLab username
• Password: Personal Access Token

using the Web UI http://localhost:4873 or via npm CLI:

yarn login --registry http://localhost:4873

and publish packages:

yarn publish --registry http://localhost:4873

Access Levels

Access and publish access rights are mapped following the rules below.

verdaccio-gitlab access control will only be applied to package sections that are marked with gitlab: true as in the configuration sample above. If you wish to disable gitlab authentication to any package config, just remove the element from the config.

Access

access is allowed depending on the following verdaccio package configuration directives:

• authenticated users are able to access all packages
• unauthenticated users will be able to access packages marked with either $all or $anonymous access levels at the package group definition

Please note that no group or package name mapping is applied on access, any user successfully authenticated can access all packages.

Publish

publish is allowed if the package name matches the logged in user id, if the package name or scope of the package matches one of the user's groups, and the user has auth.gitlab.publish access rights on the group, or if the package name (possibly scoped) matches on the user's projects, and the user has auth.gitlab.publish access rights on the project.

For instance, assuming the following configuration:

• auth.gitlab.publish = $maintainer
• the gitlab user sample_user has access to group group1 as $maintainer and group2 as $reporter in gitlab and has access to project group3/project as $maintainer
• then this user would be able to access any package
• publish any of the following npm packages in verdaccio:
  • sample_user
  • group1
  • any package under @group1/**
  • @group3/project
  • error if the user tries to publish any package under @group2/**

Configuration Options

The full set of configuration options is:

auth:
  gitlab:
    url: <url>
    authCache:
      enabled: <boolean>
      ttl: <integer>
    publish: <string>

Option	Default	Type	Description
url	<empty>	url	mandatory, the url of the gitlab server
authCache: enabled	true	boolean	activate in-memory authentication cache
authCache: ttl	300 (0=unlimited)	integer	time-to-live of entries in the authentication cache, in seconds
publish	$maintainer	[$guest, $reporter, $developer, $maintainer, $owner]	group minimum access level of the logged in user required for npm publish operations

Authentication Cache

In order to avoid too many authentication requests to the underlying gitlab instance, the plugin provides an in-memory cache that will save the detected groups of the users for a configurable ttl in seconds.

No clear-text password is saved in-memory, just an SHA-256 hash of the user+password, plus the groups information.

By default, the cache will be enabled and the credentials will be stored for 300 seconds. The ttl is checked on access, but there's also an internal timer that will check expired values regularly, so data of users not actively interacting with the system will also be eventually invalidated.

Please note that this implementation is in-memory and not multi-process; if the cluster module is used for starting several verdaccio processes, each process will store its own copy of the cache, so each user will actually be logged in multiple times.

Docker

git clone https://github.com/bufferoverflow/verdaccio-gitlab.git
cd verdaccio-gitlab
docker-compose up --build -d

• login with user root and password verdaccio on Gitlab via http://localhost:50080
• create a Personal Access Token
• login to the npm registry http://localhost:4873 via browser
• publish your packages via command line

The Dockerfile provides a default configuration file that is internally available under /verdaccio/conf/config.yaml. In order to overwrite this configuration you can provide your own file and mount it on docker startup with the --volume option, or equivalent mechanism (e.g. ConfigMaps on Kubernetes / OpenShift with the helm chart).

Create a Release

Run one of the following command to create a release:

yarn release:major
yarn release:minor
yarn release:patch

finally run

yarn publish

Flow Support

In order to support flow, flow-typed support files are installed in the repo. These are generated based on the dependencies of the project and committed to the repository.

Anytime the project dependencies change, run the following command to update the flow-typed support files:

# Just once in your environment
yarn global add flow-typed

flow-typed install

Functional Tests

In order to run functional tests with debug output, set the VERDACCIO_DEBUG=true environment variable, as documented by verdaccio:

VERDACCIO_DEBUG=true yarn test:functional

Inspired by

• verdaccio-ldap
• node-bacstack
• verdaccio-bitbucket

License

MIT