I’ve been unable to install packages since the 0.176.0 update switched to npm 2.3.0. I finally managed to get updates to install by using the old 0.175.0 release, which has an older version of npm. I’m creating this thread so other people who stumble upon this issue will know what to do to solve it.
Background:
My computer at work is behind a corporate firewall that intercepts SSL communications and signs it with its own CA certificate. This blows up everything that uses its own internal CA store, which is pretty much all of Atom and everything it uses. It makes life difficult for some of us.
Old workaround:
We used to be able to create a %USERPROFILE%\.npmrc file that contained strict-ssl = false to disable SSL security checks with npm, as well as disabling security checks with git (git config --global http.sslVerify false). This worked until npm 2.3.0. Its probably a bug, but somewhere down the chain of dependencies it starts checking certificates again, and everything blows up.
New modified workaround:
Make sure you disable SSL checks like above. Then, find the old 0.175.0 version of Atom and install it. You can find it on this github page: https://github.com/atom/atom/releases
After it is installed, navigate here:
%LOCALAPPDATA%\atom\app-0.175.0\resources\app\apm\bin
Run: apm.cmd upgrade
The upgrade should complete successfully. At least it did for me.