Equivalent of npmrc config option for Yarn Berry/Modern

[simonhaenisch]

Tell us more.

Currently we can set a default registry for repos to use via the npmrc config option:

module.exports = {
  npmrc: 'registry=<our-registry-server>',
  npmrcMerge: true,
}

This works for npm and Yarn 1 but not for newer Yarn versions. Can we get an equivalent field yarnrc that works for yarn 2+?

btw parsing registry urls from yarnrc yaml files is already supported, see #16353. I also looked at #14756 but it seems like a different problem (related to authentication).

[rarkins]

Is it because you do not configure your .yarnrc.yml default registry in the repo?

[simonhaenisch]

Ok I wasn't aware of registryUrls. If I do

packageRules: [
  {
    matchManagers: ['npm'],
    registryUrls: ['https://our-custom-registry.net']
  }
]

is that equivalent to setting

{ npmrc: 'registry="https://our-custom-registry.net"' }

as in it uses that registry unless the repo configures a different one via its own .npmrc file?

[rarkins]

Setting packageRules.registryUrls will override anything in .npmrc files

Doing so should make sure Renovate looks up from the registry you specify, but it doesn't mean that Yarn itself will do so

[simonhaenisch]

Right got it, then it's not what we need because we need Yarn to put the correct URLs in the lock file.

We can set YARN_NPM_REGISTRY_SERVER as an env var via customEnvVariables for the sidecar, however that takes precedence over the npmRegistryServer setting in the repo's .yarnrc.yml, which is undesired for us, i.e. we want to set the default but repos should be able to configure sth else.

I think yarnrc as a new config option might make the most sense then? (maybe just a bit unclear that it would only be for yarn berry, not yarn 1 which works with npmrc)

[rarkins]

We actually don't like having npmrc and would like to remove it. As we grow to dozens of package managers we don't want to add config options for each.

The solution should be this:

• Renovate configuration using packageRules (to control registryUrls) and hostRules (to control credentials)
• Renovate writes relevant information out to disk before calling Yarn

Assuming you're self-hosted, have you tried adding a ~/.yarnrc.yml to your container and seeing if it gets picked up by Yarn commands?

BTW we don't recommend using sidecar images anymore, it's better to use binarySource=install instead of binarySource=docker.

[simonhaenisch]

Thanks for all the info, appreciate it!

Creating a yarnrc.yml instead of setting customEnvVariables is what i thought about the other day but wasn't aware of an easy way to do this without having our own sidecar image. Good that you mention the binarySource thing, i'll look into it 🙏