Today I learnt

I spent a tonne of time trying to figure out how to publish a private package on gitlab and install it both locally and on a platform like vercel. Here are some general findings.

• Both github and gitlab have their own package registry where you can publish your private packages.
• During build time, vercel platform or any other, would need access to the private package. This is achieved by setting an environment variable on vercel.
• Gitlab only lets you publish scoped packages. And in order to create a scoped package, I ended up creating a group with the same name as the scope, thereby following proper naming conventions.
• You can specify your custom registry in your .npmrc file.
• For a consumer to install your private package, you need to create a personal access token on gitlab with api access. And use that token in the .npmrc file of your consuming app.
• For your module itself, you need to specify the custom registry in your package.json as well as the .npmrc file so that npm publish can publish to your custom registry.
• For integration with Vercel, you can run vc env add NPM_RC preview < ~/.npmrc. Replace preview with the other vercel environments like development and production.