salvmd
commented
5 years ago Hi @daughey , in order to help us investigate, could you send us detailed logs (by setting the "System.debug" variable to "true") of a run where you see this issue? If you prefer, you can send them directly to me at "sameln at microsoft dot com". If you have it, it would also be very helpful to see the .npmrc that you inspected. Could you please remove any sensitive information from it (especially the token) and send it to us as well?
daughey
himel951
ddtch
tsawyer999
leepowelldev
wespen
mafideju
Andycharalambous
Bug Summary
The npm and npm authenticate tasks will update the .npmrc file with the correct token from the service endpoint but they will surround the value with double quotes and that causes 401 errors.
Details
Within AzDO Pipelines, trying to access an npm feed from a different AzDO Organization proved to be more difficult than it should be.
The various articles and blogs all say to use the npm task or the npm authenticate task to update the .npmrc file. Like this one: Use npm to store JavaScript packages in Azure DevOps Services or TFS
When attempting this implementation it was unsuccessful due to 401 errors for what was known to be a valid access token on the configured service endpoint.
Hosted and private agents were tried but all were unsuccessful until we published the .npmrc file for inspection and noticed that the valid access token was surrounded with double quotes.
To prove the issue, the .npmrc file was updated in source control to have the valid token (without the double quotes) and the npm step was not used. Instead the command line task was used to invoke the npm commands. This worked as expected.
To be doubly sure, the same .npmrc file that worked with the command line was updated to have double quotes around the valid access token and it starting failing again with 401 errors.