How to use Private GitHub Packages on TravisCI

The Problem: It's fairly well documented how to use private NPM packages in a project that uses TravisCI, but what about the GitHub Package Registry?

This was the issue I was facing. I was googling all over the net and finally landed on a solution to solve this problem.

In practise, TravisCI just boots a VM or container that then runs the scripts you have defined. We can leverage the before_install script to setup Travis as a new GitHub Package user. Here is how to do it...

  1. If you're using a team, you will want to create a new user account and add it to your team. This is so we can safely generate a GitHub Token without fear of the person leaving the business in the future etc. Add this new bot user account to your GitHub Team
  2. Generate a new personal access token on the new bot user here. It will need access to write:packages and read:packages
  3. Add the newly generated token to TravisCI's environment variables as GITHUB_ACCESS_TOKEN - you will need to do this for each project that requires usage of the private package
  4. Add the following to your before_install section of your .travis.yml
before_install:
  - echo "//npm.pkg.github.com/:_authToken=${GITHUB_ACCESS_TOKEN}" > .npmrc
  - npm config --global set <YOUR ORG>:registry https://npm.pkg.github.com
  - cp .npmrc ~/
  1. Swap the <YOUR ORG> with your GitHub Organization name without the @ - in our case the line would read npm config --global set k0ru:registry https://npm.pkg.github.com - this org name should also be contained within the package name that you publish, so in the package.json file for your package the name should be @<YOUR ORG>/package-name.
  2. Push up your new .travis.yml file and kick off a build!

Hey presto that should all fit together and download correctly. Short article but it's the article I wish existed when I was searching for an answer!