'Unable to Authenticate' when trying to connect to Azure DevOps Artifacts feed through npm; I get an E401 error

I had an issue where I couldn't connect, even though I had the same .npmrc as other repos on the same machine.Running vsts-npm-auth -config .npmrc just exited, presumably happy with the cached credentials.

However, the credentials it had seemed to be bad. The solution was to force refreshing the token:vsts-npm-auth -config .npmrc -force

This usually happens when you've recently changed your password. To fix this problem, I ran this command within VS Code's Powershell terminal (any terminal will work)

vsts-npm-auth -config .npmrc

With doing so, a GUI popped-up where I was able to select the account I wanted to use to authenticate.

I hope this helps!

When Microsoft updated changed the name of VSTS to Azure DevOps, they also changed many of the URLs. Most of the old ones still redirect, but it looks like you have a mismatch in your .npmrc file above. Change the URI in the first line to match the other lines, so it looks like this:

registry=https://pkgs.dev.azure.com/[org]/_packaging/[feed].Npm/npm/registry

That should unblock you.

As a note, if you have both the registry and your credentials in the same file, and that file is being committed to source control, you are also saving your credentials to source control. Best practice here is to keep .npmrc in your project root that only has that first line, the one that tells npm which registry to connect to. Then, create a new file at ~/.npmrc (if you are using Windows you can use git bash to help put it in the right place) and just add the other two lines, the ones with your credentials. This will keep your creds local to your machine and the file with the registry note can safely be committed.

Also, remember that the credentials you generate from the Azure package registry are good for 90 days at the most, so at some point you will get the unauthorized error message again and you will need to update the credentials in your local ~/.npmrc file.