Issue pulling from Gitlab private package registry

Question

We have a self-hosted GitLab (15.5.4) and I've configured everything we needed for publishing npm packages. A CI/CD pipeline that properly creates the entry in the Package Registry.

The problem is that when I pull the package [npm i @scope/lib] (It doesn't change if I cast the auth token in the package.json or I pass through an environment variable as suggested in the documentation) the unwanted result is that the @scope/lib doesn't have the dist/ folder in it!! [node_module/@scope/lib/].

If I browse to the Package Registry and manually download the .tgz file I can see that the dist/ folder is present.
I've played around a bit with the .npmignore and "prepublish" script but I had no success and literally have no glue why this is happening.

Any tips would be very appreciated

Answer 1

To clarify:

• The proper way is to tell npm to keep the dist/ folder, bypassing the .gitignore file (instead of defining an .npmignore article here ) is to define a files entry in the package.json :

{
  "files": [
    "dist",
    "build",
    ...
  ]
}

• Another unproper way to do get the result I needed is to use a postinstall command. But it is clearly an anti-pattern. Given that I am writing a typescript library, that is tested and then compiled by the CI, there's no need to recompile it within the postinstall command. But it could be an hacky solution when needed.

{
  "scripts": {
    "postinstall": "tsc src/index.ts"
  }
}

To sum up, I think it was only an npm cache issue or more probably a server-side cache issue, because I've run npm cache clean --force different times.

Hope this helps.