The JavaScript Package Registry
To resolve packages by name and version, npm talks to a registry website that implements the CommonJS Package Registry specification for reading package info.
Additionally, npm's package registry implementation supports several write APIs as well, to allow for publishing packages and managing user account information.
The official public npm registry is at http://registry.npmjs.org/. It is powered by a CouchDB database at http://isaacs.iriscouch.com/registry. The code for the couchapp is available at http://github.com/npm/npmjs.org. npm user accounts are CouchDB users, stored in the http://isaacs.iriscouch.com/_users database.
The registry URL is supplied by the registry config parameter. See
npm-config(1), npmrc(5), and npm-config(7) for more on managing
npm's configuration.
Yes!
The easiest way is to replicate the couch database, and use the same (or similar) design doc to implement the APIs.
If you set up continuous replication from the official CouchDB, and then
set your internal CouchDB as the registry config, then you'll be able
to read any published packages, in addition to your private ones, and by
default will only publish internally. If you then want to publish a
package for the whole world to see, you can simply override the
--registry config for that command.
Set "private": true in your package.json to prevent it from being
published at all, or
"publishConfig":{"registry":"http://my-internal-registry.local"}
to force it to be published only to your internal registry.
See package.json(5) for more info on what goes in the package.json file.
No. If you want things to be public, then publish them into the public registry using npm. What little security there is would be for nought otherwise.
No, but it's way easier. Basically, yes, you do, or you have to effectively implement the entire CouchDB API anyway.
Yes, head over to https://npmjs.org/