I experienced some initial configuration pain with their Package Registry, but after generating PATs for local use and passing secrets thru the CICD build runner nicely - and using yarn - I have had no issues publishing nor installing my own private modules.
Here are the commands I suggest you run to authenticate your local machine to GitLab:
yarn config set "@example:registry" "https://gitlab.example.com/api/v4/packages/npm/"
yarn config set //gitlab.example.com/api/v4/packages/npm/:_authToken "<your PAT here>"
yarn config set //gitlab.example.com/api/v4/projects/:_authToken "<your PAT here>"
When you need to debug, the output of
yarn config list
is pretty concise and helpful. Be aware there can be local per-config folder so if you have trouble in a specific project you should issue that command there and check for incorrect registry settings etc. I also suggest you fully commit to yarn or npm, they are definitely different enough to be awkward to combine.
