Support disturl from npm config

[cjbarth]

Node supports an npm config distrul to set a custom distribution source. Perhaps n should leverage that. It would certainly make setup more consistent.

[qw3rtman]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't disturl for a custom distribution source for npm modules rather than for node distribution sources?

[cjbarth]

It doesn't seem to be very well documented anywhere, but disturl is for the NodeJs sources, and registry is for the npm registry. This might help a little: https://github.com/cnpm/cnpmjs.org/wiki/Deploy-a-private-npm-registry-in-5-minutes

You can see there it references https://npm.taobao.org/mirrors/node, which points to NodeJs, not npm. There are other references like http://www.jianshu.com/p/ad29d97b0e9d that talk about this too. VSCode uses this technique: microsoft/vscode@8334c89. Additionally, node-gyp uses this. See npm/npm#6923 and http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18503373/how-to-set-tarball-url-of-node-gyp-via-environment-variable

I've been using this on my machine quite successfully.

[qw3rtman]

Thanks for the references. I learned something new today. 😄

Although disturl isn't too well-known and the chances of it being set inadvertently are low (i.e: someone would likely know if they have it set), I think it's better to err on the safe side and check PROJECT_URL first as described here and then check disturl if PROJECT_URL isn't set.

[cjbarth]

That seems reasonable to me. So, it would be check NODE_MIRROR, check PROJECT_URL, and finally check disturl? That would have the benefit of not breaking anyone. Of course, the documentation should be updated to reference disturl. I would normally contribute a PR for this, but my shell scripting leaves a lot to be desired. Sorry.

[qw3rtman]

Yes, that's what I was going for.

I'm pretty sure this wouldn't break anyone's n, but since we can't be sure that someone isn't using disturl (and thus isn't expecting n to work any differently), I think this would warrant bumping major.

[joaomoreno]

This would be awesome.

[shadowspawn]

This issue has not had any activity in over six months. It isn't likely to get acted on due to this report.

Feel free to open a new issue if it comes up again, with new information and renewed interest.

Thank you for your contributions.