The npm client saves cached packages that were downloaded, as well as the JSON metadata responses (named .cache.json ).
The JSON metadata cache files contain URLs which the npm client uses to communicate with the server, as well as other ETag elements sent by previous requests.
We recommend removing the npm caches (both packages and metadata responses) before using Artifactory for the first time. This is to ensure that your caches only contain elements that are due to requests from Artifactory and not directly from https://registry.npmjs.org.
The default cache directory on Windows is %APPDATA%\npm-cache while on Linux it is ~/.npm.