I just set this up for my work. Here’s what I did:
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Setup empty NPM registry: I followed the instructions from this fork of npmjs.org, which adds much improved documentation.
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Setup Kappa: I used Kappa, a great npm proxy from Paypal. (I’m guessing they have a very similar use case to most people who want a private repository; this was exactly what I wanted).
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Setup npm_lazy (optional): I wanted a nice cache of frequently used packages in case npmjs.org went down, so I added npm_lazy in front of the whole thing, as a caching layer.
Whole thing took two days(ish) to get up and running. As a side note, if you’re worried about people pushing to the public registry by accident, I recommend adding this to your package.json:
"publishConfig": { "registry": "http://my-registry.example.com" },
This really is just a bit of paranoia; once you setup your npm to point to your Kappa/npm_lazy instance, Kappa handles publishing to your private repository for you.
Note: Kappa will only every publish to the first repository in it’s config. If you need to publish to both your private registry, and the public, you will need to work out your own solution.