How to fix npm password issue and npm install failure in general

Question

When deploying to my app service using Azure DevOps pipeline, I get this error:

npm ERR! code E401

npm ERR! Incorrect or missing password.

npm ERR! If you were trying to login, change your password, create an

npm ERR! authentication token or enable two-factor authentication then npm ERR! that means you likely typed your password in incorrectly. npm ERR! Please try again, or recover your password at:

npm ERR! https://www.npmjs.com/forgot

Answer 1

@MAULDIN, CLIFTON ANDRE , Apologies for the delayed response.

Just to clarify, does it work fine locally/outside of App Service?

Based on my understanding of your issue, the error npm ERR! Incorrect or missing password typically indicates an issue with the authentication process when trying to install packages from npm.

Since the application is being build on a separate machine (the DevOps agent), variables may need to be added here as needed. For instance, with Node and DevOps pipelines, the database related environment variables would need to be added if doing migrations, or else it'll fail the build. You can review this documentation on how to add variables to pipelines.

In general ( as outlined here), this seems to be a popular issue of npm - sometimes you saved some credentials for private repo on .npmrc file at the root of the home folder. So when you did npm install on project, you migght get package-lock.json file contents appended with the private repo url.

If the issue still persists, you may set app config setting SCM_DO_BUILD_DURING_DEPLOYMENT deployment setting to true -- Kudu assumes by default that deployments from zip files are ready to run and do not require additional build steps during deployment, such as npm install or dotnet restore/dotnet publish.

Similar SO discussion thread for some additional pointers.

Kindly let us know how it goes, I'll follow-up with you further.