In support of offline computer education in prisons that require npm, Caspia has support for software that permits use of npm in an offline environment (such as a prison laptop or network without internet access). This is based on verdaccio as an offline cache.
To use verdaccio as an offline cache, the cache must be populated with the npm repos that are desired to be available offline. Caspia has simple software for this, called npm-populate. When run, this creates the storage files used in verdaccio from a list of modules that should be available (including their dependancies). We've also stored results of some runs of npm-populate in downloadable .tar.gz files that can be used directly with verdaccio. References to those downloads are available here (along withe links to other Caspia projects). The current master list of modules that are used in current populate runs is in moduleList.txt This list is mostly derived from the needs of our current students (doing React development) but also includes other modules that are popular in npm.
Npm-populate includes in the release/ folder some Docker files and instructions that allow this to be deployed, but those instructions are intended to be used with online demos. The main application of this is intended to be with the OPE project. that focuses on deployment of offline resources, including laptops, in support of education programs in the Washington State Department of Corrections.
To allow testing of the offline npm repos (including for use of instructors to confirm that a particular module is available offline), Caspia has a demo site of the offline npm repo. The master list of available demos will be kept here, but as of this writing only one is available, whose use will be described below.
The demo is at http://npmdemo.caspia.org:2302 (but see below, this link as a web link is not really useful).
Simply navigating to that page as a website, you will see the standard verdaccio web interface showing available private packages, and allowing you to login to add packages. There are no available logins or private packages, so this is not a useful page.
To use the offline registry, you have to specify it as a registry in an npm install command. For
testing, one complication is that npm install will use its local cache to install files, and if you
are testing an offline install you don't want that, as npm might appear to install something from the offline demo
that is really being served from your local cache. To get around that, when you do a test install you
need to specify an empty cache, as well as a link to the offline demo registry. The commands below
will do a test install, creating a local cache directory ./cache/ You should delete that directory
when you are done testing.
Entering this should allow you to install locally the npm module passport and dependencies using the demo registry:
npm install --cache ./cache --registry http://npmdemo.caspia.org:2302 passport
That install should succeed. To confirm that you are using the offline repo (which has limited package and version availability) try this command, which should fail because only angular@1.6.9 is available in the cache:
npm install --cache ./cache --registry http://npmdemo.caspia.org:2302 angular@1.6.8
npm install --cache ./cache --registry http://npmdemo.caspia.org:2302 angular