Some people (here and elsewhere) have expressed similar sentiments about NPM. What would be your preferred alternative? Self hosted? Github releases?
Originally I built it to be self hosted, but NPM was just so darned easy to work with and made the process smoother, so I focused on that. NPM is really just a CDN in this context.
For the Mac: Brew, or just a download from a website.
For Linux: Download from a website or PPAs.
Again if NPM works, just stick with it, even if it weird.
Then you'd be able to do the ol' "specify base url" and as long as that host answers appropriately it should Just Work ( also doesn't stop you from then having npm configured as the default ); source freedom without blowing up configuration complexity
Publishing on the other hand I don't have easy recs for that don't eventually result in a lot of special-casing; That said, npm, git-compatible, s3-compatible, and ftp-compatible would cover most use cases, I think? Beyond those deployment types, custom deployment needs may well be better suited to pay you for a support contract anyway? )
It worked this way in an earlier iteration. I just wanted to make it simpler. I'll probably circle back and re-enable some of the more custom setups.
It does allow to you generate the apps and installers locally, but they are still "connected" to the cloud (NPM) for downloading the actual jar files and performing updates.
Similar to GP I wouldn't be trusting NPM with this kind of thing. For the convenience factor of it though, you should definitely leave that in place.
Have there been some events that cast doubt on the trustworthiness of NPM? vs, say Github?