Show HN: PyDist – Private Python Package Hosting | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: PyDist – Private Python Package Hosting

pydist.com

25 pointsalexbecker18 comments

Charging for uploads and downloads? isn't that making the whole service inconvenient

It says 2000 monthly downloads. I will consume that in a single day with my automated CI pipeline. Is hard to take this into consideration.

Uploads and downloads makes sense to be unlimited. At least having bandwidth limits like any basic hosting service.

Wouldn't be enough to get unlimited downloads? Upper cap on the uploads often does not affect CI pipelines, unless CI includes packaging (which I would rather push toward CD).

> Helpful

> Browse your packages and read their documentation just like on the public Python Package Index.

I don't remember the last time I read package information from pypi. It's all on Github or readthedocs or similar. And given that it isn't especially difficult to host your own index [0] or make docker images with all the dependencies pre-installed, I don't see how this justifies the price.

If it were available as an extension on Github or a self-hosted git server solution like GitLab, Gitea or Bitbucket, then that would be more interesting to me.

[0]: https://packaging.python.org/guides/hosting-your-own-index/

For those looking to secure their systems from external source failures, I'd recommend taking a look at Sonatype's Nexus Repository [1]. It supports a wide range of package sources and has the option to self-host.

I almost didn't know that Github was down the other day because all the packages I was using were already cached on Nexus.

[1] https://www.sonatype.com/nexus-repository-software-component...

It’ll also host Docker containers.

I've used DevPi [1] in my previous job while my current team uses Artifactory [2] and both are pretty decent solutions while the latter of course is rather expensive.

Personally I've found DevPi to be more than sufficient for a small-medium team that can spare a little time to set it up and maintain it but PyDist's pricing plans would make it an attractive alternative (except for that download limit, that won't fly).

That being said I wonder how a service like this will fare once the GitHub Package Registry [3] becomes mainstream and introduces Python support.

[1] https://github.com/devpi/devpi [2] https://jfrog.com/artifactory/ [3] https://github.com/features/package-registry

No offense, but I'm getting to the point of hating free trials.

Why?

1. Because you're fixed in an arbitrary point of time, which means you have to focus on the free trial above other things, many of which might deliver higher value.

2. If you decide to not use it, it's wasted time. Like a design decision that you don't discover that's a showstopper 40 hours into the trial.

3. 14 days really isn't a good metric to decide if it's worth using your service or not. You may not see real issues until you get at least a month into the service.

4. Anyone who is seriously considering purchasing the service isn't going to bat an eye at the actual cost.

It says it mirrors PyPI. Does that mean I can use --index-url rather than --extra-index-url? The latter has some properties that make it less than ideal for private packages.

Yes, you can use --index-url.

I assume you're referring to how --extra-index-url means that pip will randomly choose which index to try to install from, potentially installing a public package by the same name instead of your private package?

I 'like' how instead of Pricing, the link to the pricing is ambiguously titled Plans, as if it were a link to their project roadmap instead of a payed service.

Perhaps I'm unusual in this regard, but in the context of software I'd interpret 'plans' as shorthand for 'pricing plans'. I certainly can't recall having regularly seen 'plan' substituted for 'roadmap' with regards software development.

Project Plan, Testing Plan, Upgrade Plan

"A plan is typically any diagram or list of steps with details of timing and resources, used to achieve an objective to do something. See also strategy. It is commonly understood as a temporal set of intended actions through which one expects to achieve a goal."

I'd argue that you're playing dumb when you're saying that it's equally likely to interpret "Plans" in this context as any of the examples you mention rather than "Pricing Plans". Come on. Do you see a lot of similar pages that link you to their "Plans" and you end up in their public roadmap(s!) because they meant project plan(s!)? Or their testing procedures? No. Because landing pages are customer-centric.

Call me dumb if you want, but I was genuinely expecting to see a roadmap, because I would have never expected someone to try to charge for something like this.

Why would you not expect someone to charge for this? There are many services that charge for hosting private packages (rather than making them public to the world); I'm not aware of _any_ service that does so for free.

I read private, and didn't notice the word hosting, so I thought it was an on-prem package indexing. Uploading their proprietary code to some random hosting provider isn't something that would fly with any of my clients, so I didn't expect that. Whenever I see a product landing page with pricing, they title it Pricing, so calling it something else sounds like someone playing coy with the fact they're a payed product. Compare with Artifactory, which is up-front about it, and offers much more than just a package index.

Nice work.

Obligatory question: how does it compare to DevPI?

DevPi is a good solution if you want to self-host a Python package index. PyDist has some additional features like API keys and download statistics which I think are nice, but the main selling point is that you don't have to set up and maintain it yourself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com