Confusing message "You may want to copy..."

[callumlocke]

Confusing message "You may want to copy..."

[vish288]

how do you resolve this issue, because npmrc seems to do nothing after throwing this error.
[edit] - what worked for me.
This can be sidestepped by backing up the folder and reinitializing npmrc

mv ~/.npmrcs ~/.npmrcs_bak
npmrc

This should make it working again.

[timoxley]

npmrc manages the symlinks for you. It will initialise things into a sensible state when you run npmrc by copying the current non-symlink ~/.npmrc into ~/.npmrcs/default and symlinking ~/.npmrc to ~/.npmrcs/default:

 ➜  ~  npmrc
 Creating /Users/conrad/.npmrcs
 Making /Users/conrad/.npmrc the default npmrc file
 Activating .npmrc 'default'

This error happens when npmrc doesn't know what to do because it expects to have been initialised i.e. it expects your ~/.npmrc to be a symlink, but it is not so it bails.

also, why? what's the benefit of it being a symlink?

It's not because of some magic property of a symlink, it's because npmrc uses symlinks to function, and if ~/.npmrc is not a symlink things are in an unknown state and npmrc doesn't know what to do. Why does npmrc use symlinks?Running things like npm config set cache-min=0 writes to ~/.npmrc. A symlink ensures you can't lose any data when changing the "current" npmrc (i.e. swapping where the symlink at ~/.npmrc points.).

[nwayve]

Just ran into this issue (same confusing error message) yesterday with version 1.1.1.
I followed @vish1988 's solution and got it working again.
Thanks @callumlocke for opening the issue years ago, you da real MVP.