Can there be a config to silence these warnings?

No there will not. This is an important warning that npm is doing something unexpected. The only place this will likely remain a permanent warning and not an eventual exception is publishConfig because that is ostensibly something other package managers may use. cli flags and npmrc files are not for parsing by things that aren't npm. The warnings from publishConfig will likely change to a "this is being ignored" message when we move to fully disallowing undefined configs, but it will always be there. npm has no way of knowing what in there is legitimate or a mistake so it will always warn.

I agree that anything in npmrc or cli flags is npm's sole purview, and warnings make sense - but things in package.json aren't and they often won't.

This is an important warning

We 💜 breaking changes _(no)

As I understand, I will no longer be able to put something like

ENV_VAR=123

into my .npmrc file and get npm_config_ENV_VAR environment variable when running npm scripts?

@wraithgar can we at least make this warning not just say "we'll drop it" but SUGGEST AN ALTERNATIVE for envs in .npmrc file? Setting envs via .npmrc file was documented and I guess is quite used around (also in my project), people will have to migrate (as I understand, an alternative is package.json "config"?).

Thanks.

@Tayvon @wraithgar guys with this update you'll break some existing packages.

In prev npm versions, I was able to have this .npmrc file:

ANY_ENV_VAR=dev

...which would set npm_config_ANY_ENV_VAR env var to dev when running npm install and so.

I used this to install @mycompany/mypackage which internally reads process.env["npm_config_ANY_ENV_VAR"] in its "postinstall" script with

process.env[`npm_config_ANY_ENV_VAR`];

How to do it now with this new update?

I've tried reading process.env["npm_package_config_ANY_ENV_VAR"] but there's no npm_package_config_ANY_ENV_VAR (maybe it's not populated for postinstall of dependent packages?).

Setting envs manually is not an option, as I want people to just npm install (when pulling the repo) and do nothing more (like settings envs)