Hey, Eddie! Welcome to the Vercel Community

The issue you’re running into is most likely due to how the NPM_RC environment variable is being formatted. It needs to contain actual line breaks, not the literal characters.

A few things to double-check:

• Use real newlines: In the Vercel Dashboard, press Enter to create actual line breaks inside the NPM_RC variable. Literal won’t work.
• Swap out placeholders: Make sure {namespace} and {pak} are replaced with your actual GitHub org/username and your personal access token.
• Start with a minimal config: Try testing with just the essentials to make sure the basics work:

1
@{your-org}:registry=https://npm.pkg.github.com/
2
//npm.pkg.github.com/:_authToken={your-token}

• Check token permissions: Your GitHub PAT needs at least the read:packages scope.
• Verify the variable in the build: Add echo "$NPM_RC" somewhere in your install step so you can confirm it’s being passed correctly.

Hope this helps!

Hi Pauline,

Thanks for your reply and sorry for taking a while to respond, I have been away.

I managed to fix my issue! The problem I had was I was attempting to verify the existence of the generated .npmrc file during install using cat .npmrc && npm i.

This causes an error because, apparently, no such file exists. If I simply remove the cat command then everything works correctly.

I don’t know what Vercel is doing behind the scenes to make this work but I can’t complain too much.

It is slightly misleading that the documentation says a file is generated because we cannot verify its existence.

Anyway your suggested to use echo "$NPM_RC" made me remove the cat command which revealed that it was actually working, so thanks for that hahaha.

Cheers

I'm glad that you managed to find a solution!

Thanks - see you around the community