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@vltpkg/registry-client

registry-client

This is a very light wrapper around undici, optimized for interfacing with an npm registry.

Cache Unzipped · Integrity Options · Usage

Overview

Any response with immutable in the cache-control header, or with a content-type of application/octet-stream or a path ending in .tgz, will be cached forever and never requested again as long as the cache survives.

If the request has a cached response:

  • Cached responses with immutable in the cache-control header will be returned from cache without a network request, no matter what.
  • Cached responses with a content-type of application/octet-stream will be returned from cache without a network request, no matter what, because tarballs are immutable.
  • Cached responses with max-age=<n> or s-max-age=<n> will be served from cache without a network request if it’s less than <n> seconds old.
  • Otherwise, a network request to the registry will be made
    • if an etag is present in the cached response, it will be used as the if-none-match header.
    • If a last-modified header is in the response, that will be used as the if-modified-since request header.
    • If there is no last-modified header, then use the mtime of the cache file as the if-modified-since header.

This is the extent of the cache control logic. It is not a full-featured spec-compliant caching HTTP client, because that is not needed for this use case. Every response will be cached, even if the registry headers don’t technically allow it.

Cache Unzipped

Client always sends accept-encoding: gzip;q=1.0, *;q=0.5 header when making requests, to save time on the wire.

If response has content-encoding: gzip, then we swap out the body for the unzipped response body in the cache, as if it was not gzipped in the first place. This must be done before returning the response, because you can’t JSON.parse() a gzipped response anyway.

If the response is content-type: application/octet-stream and starts with the gzip header, then we return the raw body as we received it, but as a best-effort background job, unzip it and update the cache entry to be an unzipped response body. This is done in the @vltpkg/cache-unzip worker.

So,

  • json responses will always be un-zipped, in the response and in the cache.
  • artifact responses may be gzipped (and thus, have to be unzipped by the unpack operation), but will eventually be cached as unzipped tarballs.

Thus, the content-length response header will usually not match the actual byte length of the response body.

Integrity Options

An integrity option may be specified in a fetchOptions.context object, or in the options provided to cache.set(). For example:

const integrity = `sha512-${base64hash}`
// Sets the key, and links to a file based on the integrity
// value. Any future fetches for the same integrity will yield
// this value.
cache.set(key, value, { integrity })


// Load an entry with this integrity value, if present in the
// on-disk cache, and when writing back to the disk, link to the
// appropriate integrity file as well.
const value = await cache.fetch(key, { context: { integrity } })

If the integrity provided is obviously not a valid sha512 Integrity string, then it is ignored.

Integrity values are not calculated or verified. The caller must do this check, if desired.

Note that the integrity provided to cache.fetch() or cache.set() does not typically match the calculated integrity of the object being cached. Typically, the integrity is related to the body of the response that a @vltpkg/registry-client.CacheEntry object represents.

Usage

import { Cache } from '@vltpkg/cache'


// set in the memory cache, and return immediately. in the
// background, write the entry to disk.
cache.set(someKey, someBuffer)


// if you need to wait for all pending writes to finish pending,
// you can do that like this
await cache.promise()


// get an item from the memory cache if possible, falling back to
// loading by integrity/key from the disk. Integrity is optional.
const value = await cache.fetch(someKey, { context: { integrity }})


// get from the memory cache *only*, do not read from the disk
const value = cache.get(someKey)


// Synchronous form of cache.fetch()
const value = cache.fetchSync(someKey, { context: { integrity }})


// sync and async iteration is supported
// walks over all items on disk
for await (const item of cache) { ... }
for (const item of cache) { ... }