npm Registry Checks From a Real US Phone Network

Every npm install you run from a fast office line lies to you a little. Your lockfile resolves, the tarballs arrive in seconds, and you never find out how the package behaves for a developer on hotel Wi-Fi or a phone hotspot. HourlyProxies lets you borrow a US 4G or 5G carrier line for a couple of hours, route npm through it, and see your package the way a lot of your users do. It costs $2 or $3 for two hours, with the option to add hours up to four, and it never turns into a subscription.

Installing over a slower, real link

A cold install of a project with a deep dependency tree is a good stress test for retries, timeouts and the install scripts people forget about. Running it through a mobile line shows you which postinstall step downloads a binary from a server that is slow from the US, which package fetches from a host that fails on cellular, and whether your own CLI tool prints something useful when the network stalls. Two hours is enough for several cold installs with the cache cleared between them.

4G usually runs 20 to 45 Mbps and 5G 50 Mbps and up, depending on the signal at the modem, so this is a realistic consumer link, not an artificial slow-down.

Provenance attestations and the audit report both come back from the registry during an install, so you can see whether a slower link makes the audit step finish after the install itself, and whether the retry settings in your CI configuration would have coped with a dropped connection halfway through a large tarball.

Registry limits and your own tooling

The public registry applies rate limiting to abusive request patterns, and tools that query package metadata in bulk can trip it. If you maintain such a tool, a dedicated line lets you run it from an address no one else is using and tune your pacing until the registry stops complaining, without affecting your colleagues' installs. Read the response codes, back off when asked, and keep the request rate at a level a human-driven tool would produce.

Publishing works too. Log in with your own account, publish a prerelease tag through the line, and install it back from a clean cache to confirm the tarball, the files field and the bin entries are right.

Scoped packages and the login flow are worth a try from the line as well. Sign in with your own account, publish to your scope, then fetch the package from a second machine routed the same way with a fresh read-only token. Two-factor prompts, organization access rules and granular token scopes all answer the way they will for a teammate working from a phone hotspot.

The package page as a US visitor sees it

npmjs.com renders your README, your version list and your weekly download badge for anyone who lands on it. A look from a US phone network tells you how the page reads at phone width, whether your images load, and whether your install snippet is the first thing a visitor sees. If you run docs on a separate host, check it in the same session.

Pointing npm at the line

npm honours a proxy setting in its config and the standard HTTPS_PROXY environment variable. Set either to the HTTP endpoint from your dashboard, or run npm under a SOCKS5 wrapper if you prefer. Yarn and pnpm read the same variables. Confirm the route with a request to any IP echo service before you start measuring.

Pricing is simple: $2 for the first two hours on 4G, $3 on 5G, the same again per extra hour, and four hours per purchase at most. Keep the line all day and the hours already paid count toward the $5 or $6 day price. Weeks and months exist when a job runs long.

• Cold installs over a real consumer link
• Tune bulk metadata tools without annoying the registry
• Publish and reinstall a prerelease in one sitting
• HTTP(S) and SOCKS5, unlimited data under fair use

A note on fairness

Please do not mirror the registry, inflate download counts or use rotation to get around a block. The registry's terms forbid it and so does our acceptable-use policy. Use the line to learn how your package behaves for real people on real networks, which is the whole point.

Setting up a npm proxy on HourlyProxies

1. Pick 4G or 5G and a city, and buy two hours in the dashboard or the Telegram bot.
2. Set npm's proxy config or HTTPS_PROXY to the line's HTTP endpoint.
3. Clear the npm cache and run a cold install of your project.
4. Publish a prerelease and install it back from the registry.
5. Note the timings and let the hours expire.

npm proxy questions