Connecting to a vpn to access internally hosted artifactory

Support
1

Hello, I’m doing discovery to move our internally hosted website to Netlify for a large company in the banking sector.

We have an internal Artifactory instance not exposed to the internet that you must access trough vpn to download packages from our private NPM registry.

I understand we can provide an npmrc file that will allow the builders to authenticate to the registry, we already have those injected in our projects at build time. What I am wondering is wether it is possible to have the builders connect to our vpn before starting the dependency install?

Also in that case, how are credentials for the vpn managed? Is there a secrets vault that the builders can pull from during installation to ensure that we do not need to commit vpn credentials in our repo?

Any current clients doing something similar?

2

There’s no way to connect to a VPN before installing dependencies. The only way for you would be to run npm install again as a part of your build process. In that process, you can first connect to your VPN, then run npm install and finally, build your app.

As for the credentials, you can store those as environment variables.

I haven’t heard or seen anyone else do such a thing - though it’s possible that someone might be doing it, but no one has asked us for help with it. So solely based on that, I think no one is doing this.