Comment by sheetjs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sheetjs | Hacker News Reader

Verdaccio is an incredible tool. We (https://sheetjs.com) use it in production for distributing node modules to customers.

Before verdaccio, we used to post tarballs that customers would download and use, but that became cumbersome. We looked into the official npmjs service, but their pricing model ($7/user/mo, sharing private modules requires all users to have a paid account) didn't make sense in a situation with many users downloading once a month. Verdaccio let us manage the distribution on a single $5/mo digital ocean droplet and it's been working very well. We post modules to a separate scope and users configure their npm clients to download from our registry for that specific scope.

It was the first time we came across an open source project where we could actually quantify the saving, and our contributions through their OC (https://opencollective.com/verdaccio) are a drop in the bucket compared to the savings.

Have you considered donating a more significant amount to hopefully prevent it going the way of Sinopia?

The point, as we've made clear to Juan Picado and other recipients like Kir Belevich of SVGO (https://twitter.com/deepsweet/status/1120290773625450501) is a token of appreciation. We don't want to create any pressure on the developers' part to continue development.

To prevent the project from dropping off, the key developers would need to be hired to work on the project. The scale of donation O($100K/yr) is much larger than the cost of just paying npmjs.

Not that we don't enjoy donations, but this project won't go the way of Sinopia.

Trent and I originally forked Sinopia and purposefully made it an organization rather than putting it into an individual's repo. We very intentionally did not want it to become like Sinopia, though early on we couldn't contribute much to it by way of keeping up with pull requests and bug fixes.

Everyone that uses Verdaccio should be really grateful to Juan for the massive amount of work he's put into the project, as well as the other core maintainers over the pass several years. At this point (and for quite a while now) Trent and I have been on the sidelines, still owners of the organization but really more of a fail-safe than anything else. I can't speak to Trent's intentions, but if one day everyone up and left the organization, I would try and at least keep minimal patches going while looking for qualified people to become new maintainers.

That scenario is extremely unlikely, however. Verdaccio has a robust number of core contributors, and Juan has from the start been incredibly dedicated to the project. I imagine it will be around for a long, long time.

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