Clarification on how htpasswd works across redeployments?

[neezer]

Trying out the helm chart and I used the default value of secrets.htpasswd = [], then I did a new user registration with

npm adduser --registry https://my-verdaccio

and got a token and things worked fine.

Then I upgraded the chart (helm upgrade) with some new values, and now my token is no longer valid—returns 401 Unauthorized. Do I need to specify users in secrets.htpasswd so that the htpasswd secret is created? I see it's currently gated behind if .Values.secrets.htpasswd and I didn't know if [] was being treated as false-y?

If I do specify a user there, and then new registrations happen, is that secret updated to include those registrations so they persist across future redeployments (eg., helm upgrade)? If not, how are/can those registrations be preserved?

[neezer]

The 401 Unauthorized was because I had yarn/npm incorrectly configured--my tokens do survive restarts. Nm!