npmjs as a scoped registry

Is it possible to use https://www.npmjs.com/ as a scoped registry? If so, where can I find some information on the setup required?

 

I appreciate you taking your time to investigate this. Thank you very much.

 

I sent a support ticket to npmjs guys asking about the acceptable use policy regarding UPM, I will let you guys know about their response.

 

Also note that npm's scoping and Unity's scoping are fundamentally incompatible. npm uses the «@scope/name» format while unity uses the reverse DNS notation, e.g. «com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition».

• Unity does not allow the @ or / characters in package names, you therefore cannot use npm scopes in Unity
• npmjs.com doesn't allow dots in package names, you therefore cannot use Unity scopes on npmjs.com
• npmjs.com also requires scopes for any non-public package

This is unfortunately also the reason why the GitHub Package Registry is incompatible with Unity.

 

I got a response:

It seems it is not against npmjs policies to use it for UPM.

 

I had published an upm package on npm, and it can be consumed by the upm system with no issue.

Code (JavaScript):

1. "scopedRegistries": [                    
2.   {                                      
3.     "name": "npmjs",                      
4.     "url": "https://registry.npmjs.org/",
5.     "scopes": [                          
6.       "com.littlebigfun"                  
7.     ]                                    
8.   }                                      
9. ],                                          

@maximeb_unity may I ask for what reason Unity is not playing well with @Scope semantic? I understand the reverse dns notation is already a decision, but it doesn't seems conflict with "@" keyword. In npm, @Username/pkg-xyz and pkg-xyz are two different packages and have no fallback logic to each other.

Code (JavaScript):

1. com.littlebigfun.addressable-import
2. @favoyang/com.littlebigfun.addressable-import

For scoped registry, we could add "@favoyang/com.littlebigfun" as scopes to tell the system where to locate the package. Or even better add "@favoyang" as scopes could also work.

Code (JavaScript):

1. "scopedRegistries": [                      
2.   {                                        
3.     "name": "npmjs",                      
4.     "url": "https://registry.github.com/favoyang",  
5.     "scopes": [                            
6.       "@favoyang/com.littlebigfun"                  
7.     ]                                      
8.   }                                        
9. ],    

 

Oh, good to hear it actually works. I was going by the npmjs.com documentation on creating a package.json file, which states regarding the name:

 

This is a bit late, but I think this might help someone:

Over a weekend recently, I went into into extensive depth into setting up a custom scoped registry for Unity packages of my own.

I learned why https://npmjs.com (https://registry.npmjs.org) is NOT supported for hosting Unity packages that feed in the Unity Package Manager: It seems to just be because of different naming conventions.

Unity packages by convention should use reverse domain notation (com.unity.mathematics for example, where the scope would be com.unity).
However, for NPM packages, they must use an @ symbol to designate the scope, followed by a / symbol (which would be @com.unity/mathematics for example).
Because NPM and Unity Package Manager make these assumptions that MUST be true in order for it to work... they don't work together.

However, there's a free open source NPM package registry that DOES support Unity's naming conventions, called Verdaccio!
I got it running with Docker Compose (thanks to their Getting Started pages (see ~7min into the video for a docker-compose.yml example)) and I deployed it on a very small AWS EC2 instance (about $6 a month) and now can put all my packages in a place that can make my own code sharing way easier.
I love using it with Docker cause you can deploy the same thing locally if you want (being that Docker makes it easy to run the same thing predictably locally, on the cloud, etc.)

---

I'm not sure if there's a workaround I didn't know about with the naming conventions to get NPMJS to work with Unity in any kind of fashion, but I opted for a more complete solution rather than a workaround! But please do correct me if I missed something along my brief research

 

For any of you that are unaware, you can publish your open-source Unity packages on upm-packages.dev, which uses Verdaccio. That's where I published com.unity_x.modules.sceneref (a package that allows referencing scene assets at runtime). It works like npmjs (you can use npm publish after setting up that registry).
I know that there was another site too, but it only works with GitHub repos and I forgot the name.

 

There is also OpenUPM developed by @Favo-Yang which is a godsent.