Error: Could not login to npm

[zeke]

I've seen this a few times now: I run the CLI, it fails. If I run npm whoami then give npx semantic-release-cli setup another time, it works! Not sure what the deal is, as I'm not changing my login status.

First attempt fails:

$ npx semantic-release-cli setup
? What is your npm registry? https://registry.npmjs.org/
? What is your npm username? zeke
ERR! semantic-release Error: Could not login to npm.
ERR! semantic-release     at getNpmToken (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/semantic-release-cli/src/lib/npm.js:51:21)
ERR! semantic-release     at <anonymous>
ERR! semantic-release     at process._tickCallback (internal/process/next_tick.js:188:7)
ERR! semantic-release  { Error: Could not login to npm.
ERR! semantic-release     at getNpmToken (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/semantic-release-cli/src/lib/npm.js:51:21)
ERR! semantic-release     at <anonymous>
ERR! semantic-release     at process._tickCallback (internal/process/next_tick.js:188:7)
ERR! semantic-release   stack: 'Error: Could not login to npm.\n    at getNpmToken (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/semantic-release-cli/src/lib/npm.js:51:21)\n    at <anonymous>\n    at process._tickCallback (internal/process/next_tick.js:188:7)' }

But I'm logged in to npm:

$ npm whoami
zeke

Second attempt works:

$ npx semantic-release-cli setup
? What is your npm registry? https://registry.npmjs.org/
? What is your npm username? zeke
? What is your GitHub username? zeke

[gr2m]

Yeah I've seen that myself lately, without updating semantic-release-cli, I think. Would love it if someone could investigate

[zeke]

For the record, I'm still getting this error a lot.

[simlu]

Same here. How do you resolve this?

Edit: Nvm, just try again and again... :)

[simlu]

Ok, this is getting ridiculous... :/

[gr2m]

@simlu sorry that this frustrates you, but please be kind ❤️ we would appreciate if you could delete or edit your comment

[simlu]

@gr2m Apologies for not providing more details - just having a really bad day here. So this seems to be related to slow connections somehow. After tethering through my phone it worked /shrugs

[cliffvick]

I am still getting this error quite a bit as well. Has there been any progress on determining what is causing this?

[gr2m]

nope. I’m quite sure something changed on npm’s side. Nobody is looking into it right now, I get it too, all the time :( if you could look into it that’d be great

[zeke]

Hey @kbrandwijk and @pvdlg 👋 , I'm trying to understand how this part of the code works. Does the PUT request to CouchDB generate a new token on every request?

cli/src/lib/npm.js

Lines 24 to 27 in 45c00b4

	const uri = url.resolve(npm.registry, '-/user/org.couchdb.user:' + encodeURIComponent(npm.username));
	const {err, token} = await new Promise(resolve => {
	client.request(uri, {method: 'PUT', body}, async (err, parsed, raw, response) => {

[zeke]

Wondering if we could just fall back to using the token in ~/.npmrc, using get-auth-token-from-npmrc, or something similar.

[gr2m]

Does the PUT request to CouchDB generate a new token on every request?

I don’t know, but looks like it? Here is how it worked before: https://github.com/semantic-release/cli/blame/bdbf616c8f0b03816f5a509e7c48d06c92a81344/src/lib/npm.js#L12 when we used npm-registry-client

I guess that would be the right code to investigate though, if there is an error, maybe log out the error entirely and see if there is anything helpful in there?

Wondering if we could just fall back to using the token in ~/.npmrc,

I think that’d be dangerous, I very often have dedicated npm accounts only for semantic-release, I woudln’t want it accidentally take a token from my personal account when I don’t want to

[theoomoregbee]

From working on this #185 i saw that it always generates token at first, and then complain about not able to login, trying again immediately it should work, since the first try generates the token without you knowing

check https://github.com/theo4u/cli/blob/aac04906701889d4bb17b2ae75671bb2dea012ee/src/lib/npm.js#L46
i resolved it there instead of the body because parsed returns the newly generated token

@gr2m ^^

[pvdlg]

The problem come from the npm registry instability. npm-registry-client include a retry mechanism that was alleviating the network/server issues.

It has been changed to handle 409 errors from some "compatible" registries in 92e15f7.

The solution would be to use a proper http client (personally I prefer https://github.com/sindresorhus/got) that would allow to use Promises, setup the authentication (token or user/pass/email) and handle the different errors. And we would need to add a retry mechanism with https://github.com/sindresorhus/p-retry.

Another solution would be to use npm-registry-client again and to promisify it with https://github.com/sindresorhus/pify so we can handle a callback with multiple arguments (err, parsed, raw and response) with multiargs.

I would rather use https://github.com/sindresorhus/got rather than continuing to deal with the multiple issues and shortcomings of npm-registry-client (we had a bunch of problems with it in https://github.com/semantic-release/npm).