#npm-lazy-mirror

A lazy mirroring local npm server.

About

This package provides a lazy mirroring option for those that:

• Don't want to mirror the entire couchDB for npmjs.org
• Don't want to setup cron jobs for those tasks
• Want to use an in-memory caching server (allocation configurable)
• Want to easily cache dist tarballs and package metadata to disk

Install

• npm install -g npm-lazy-mirror

Run

With CLI flags:

• npm-lazy-mirror -p <port> -a <remote_address> -b <bind_address> --cache-dir /npm-data

With a JSON configuration:

• npm-lazy-mirror -C /path/to/config,json

See example/server-config.json for usage.

Note: Your remote_address configuration is important, as it is the address used when re-writing tarball URLs in the metadata. It's certainly always best to use a DNS entry here, rather than an IP.

Client configuration

Simply point your local npm config to the lazy mirror (permanent):

npm config set registry http://localhost:2000/

or per install:

npm i --registry http://localhost:2000 supertest

Help

Run npm-lazy-mirror -h to see a full list of options.

Features

• Caches all tarball / JSON metadata to disk
• Mirror serves files (200MB max by default) from memory, with a configurable LRU cache.
• Ability to blacklist packages by semantic versioning specification
• Option to serve stale resources while the upstream registry is offline
• Upstream resources are fetched on the fly from the remote registry, the fetching, storing and serving to the client all happen in the same request.
• Configurable with custom npm registries.
• HTTP/S proxy support
• It's Fast and stands up under load. Expect 5000+ req/s with one core.

A cold run installing express takes ~12 seconds (fetching from upstream registry on-the-fly):

npm install express  2.44s user 0.81s system 27% cpu 11.769 total

A warm run after all express assets are locally cached takes ~3 seconds:

npm install express  2.43s user 0.78s system 115% cpu 2.768 total

Implementation Caveats

You cannot use this mirror for publishing modules or user management, such requests will be forwarded to the upstream registry for processing.