Can private npm registries be used in a devcontainer?

Question

My org requires the use of an internal NPM registry. I'd like to use devcontainers as a way of making build environments consistent and easy to setup, but it has to use the registry specified in the .npmrc file we keep in the repository. Password login is disabled; it has to be using tokens.

Is there any way of modifying this devcontainer.json file to use a private npm registry?

{
  "name": "Custom app",
  "image": "mcr.microsoft.com/devcontainers/typescript-node:0-20",
  "remoteUser": "node",
  "postCreateCommand": "npm install"
}