Add documentation for GET of private NPM packages

Getting a 404 error when trying to fetch a private NPM package. The NPM_TOKEN is included and used as a secret. Locally I also have this problem sometimes but the issue is resolved by doing a npm login.

workflow:

name: Node CI

on: [push]

jobs:
  build:

    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@master
    - name: Use Node.js v10.x
      uses: actions/setup-node@v1
      with:
        version: 10.x
    - name: npm install, build, and test
      env:
        NPM_AUTH_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.NPM_AUTH_TOKEN }}
      run: |
        npm install
        npm run build --if-present
        npm test

[damccorm]

I don’t see any npm docs saying NPM_AUTH_TOKEN is supported. With that said, you can configure auth with this action. There are examples in the README, but in this case you would want:

name: Node CI

on: [push]

jobs:
  build:

    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@master
    - name: Use Node.js v10.x
      uses: actions/setup-node@v1
      with:
        version: 10.x
        registry: 'https://registry.npmjs.org'
    - name: npm install, build, and test
      env:
        NODE_AUTH_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.NPM_AUTH_TOKEN }}
      run: |
        npm install
        npm run build --if-present
        npm test

Note the added registry parameter for the action and the change of the env var name to NODE_AUTH_TOKEN.

Without a registry parameter we don’t configure auth by default.

[jwalton]

Or, we could add a envKey input to setup-node which defaults to “NODE_AUTH_TOKEN” and then as an end user you could make the variable whatever you wanted!

And, of course, you can always do:

      - name: npm install
        if: success()
        env:
          NPM_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.NPM_TOKEN }}
        run: |
          echo '//registry.npmjs.org/:_authToken=${NPM_TOKEN}' > .npmrc
          npm install

🙃