In my experience, I had to use a private NPM registry for security reasons and while switching projects I had to change my registry and found that I was unable to! A requirement of the private registry was to be on a VPN network so to be able to connect to the private registry.
Command I was trying to runnpx sb init --builder webpack5
I was trying to install storybook in an existing project.
I tried and failed by:
npm config set registry https://registry.npmjs.org commands even with --location= set to project, user, global
setting .npmrc with npm_config_registry=https://registry.npmjs.org value in multiple locations
even yarn wouldn't change the registry and I also tried to use the yarn specific commands as well yarn config set ...
restarting my system multiple times and re-trying all of the above in different ways
Information about my environment:
OSX, NVM (Node Version Manager), using npm not yarn
What ended up fixing my problem
2. I ended up reconnecting to the VPN so that when I ran my npx ... command from above it would still download the packages through my private registry
3. rm -rf node_modules package-lock.json I removed the installed files and lockfile
4. I disconnected from my VPN and re-installed packages with the same npx ... command
5. I see now that the packages are properly pulling from https://registry.npmjs.org
For some reason NPM wanted to resolve something from the private registry I had before finally using the newly configured public registry.
Might be a bug with NPM that I do not have the experience nor time to troubleshoot though I wanted to share my experience here in hopes it will help someone with a similar experience.