Yarn 2 and Private Repos with Authentication

15 Mar 2020

One of the problems I faced recently trying out Yarn 2, was configuring it to authenticate a private repository. The project uses Font Awesome Pro, which requires you to configure their repo in your .npmrc file and provide an auth token.

Yarn 2 no longer reads the .npmrc file, and private registries have to be configured in the project's .yarnrc.yml file instead.

It took me a little playing around and squinting at the docs in order to get the right config settings, so I'm posting them here in case they're helpful to someone else.

npmRegistries:
    //npm.fontawesome.com:
        npmAlwaysAuth: true
        npmAuthToken: "YOUR-TOKEN"
npmScopes:
    fortawesome:
        "https://npm.fontawesome.com"

To break down the settings here:

1. npmScopes: You need to tell Yarn to use a private registry for a given namespace. In this case, the namespace is @fontawesome but as per the Yarn docs we drop the @ symbol as it's not valid here.
2. npmRegistries: Yarn also needs to know about the authentication for the private registry, so we create a key with the URL of the registry (here omitting the protocol, so it works with both http and https). Nested within this, you can supply the auth token.

Hopefully this might help someone out.