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Comment by awinder | Hacker News Reader

For me JFrog is synonymous with Artifactory -- I think that was their earliest / bread & butter product? That may just be my interaction. It's an on-premise/cloud hybrid source artifact repository. The nice thing about it is that it is one product that can act as a maven/npm/pip/etc. repo. If you're in a polyglot org (big enterprise) and you have security needs/historical baggage to host on-premise (big enterprise) then you can do a lot worse picking a solution. Also has nice API & CLI components for integration, it is far from my least favorite of the enterprise-y sorts of things you can run into at a big company :)

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It's quite useful, and certainly better than trying to roll it yourself, but it's also surprisingly slow.

What is an artifact in this context?

build output

That’s even more ambiguous than “artifact”. If someone asks me for build output, I would typically think about the console logs.

A package, typically. Like a Maven package for java, a wheel/egg package for Python, a gem package for Ruby, etc.

Docker Containers

I think you mean an image, not a container?

That's correct, my apologies

Anything your build server produces that you want to serve or archive. Binaries, packages, test results, etc.

A library. If you're familiar with pip or npm or the like, you've probably used public repositories. npmjs.org hosts all the free and open source node libraries. But a big org might have a loads of closed and proprietary libraries they need to share and version among multiple development teams or partners. A product like artefactory hosts those kind of libraries for multiple languages and is compatible with the popular package managers.

It's also like a local cache of public repos. That means faster builds, some level of quality control (ie black or white list of safe libraries) as well as protection against things like the leftpad fiasco or 2016.

I would define it as a file that is distributed for use among many decoupled hosts and which is generated from some sort of source input.

Packages/libraries such as those used by NPM and Pip are some examples. It may also be an entire program, an OS package, a virtual machine, a Docker image, even things like PNG images.

Artifactory has tooling to make it easy to integrate into typical build pipelines.

How is it compared to Sonatype Nexus?

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