Show HN: PkgHub.io - Simple Ubuntu Package Hosting | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: PkgHub.io - Simple Ubuntu Package Hosting

pkghub.io

48 pointslloydpick30 comments

Meanwhile, the best package building and hosting site that no one has ever heard of: http://openbuildservice.org/ https://build.opensuse.org/

supports all major distros: openSUSE, Fedora, Debian-based, even Arch.

Last time I checked it was very much an RPM-oriented build service, with only very basic support for Debian packages.

As no one ever heard of this, it is probably not going to last for long, especially if its existence is 100% based on funding by SUSE / The Attachmate Group.

Don't get me wrong but such tools should be vendor-independent unless it targets only the vendor-specific distribution and have a clear business model so it can operate profitable.

Last time I tried to use this. I got annoyed just reading the install docs for running my own 'private' server & gave up.

To Attachmate/Novell/SUSE: Make your software easier to install. Otherwise no one will use it. And you will have to do all the work, which makes me wonder why you bothered open sourcing it at all.

This system was built by @supersheep and @lloydpick (me) in 48 hours as part of the http://railsrumble.com competition, so if you encounter a bug please just let us know.

Typo on your home page: publically -> publicly

Whoops, will get that fixed once the lockdown period ends in the competition. Have to wait until Thursday unfortunately.

another typo: "that provides you with an easy to way host and manage" -> "that provides you with an easy way to host and manage"

had to read it 3 times to notice the difference...

I'm at 8 times

to way > way to

I was on the verge of running them through `diff`

You should add a pricing page ASAP :D because this "seems" way simpler than good old launchpad

Still trying to figure that bit out at the moment, I suspect we'll go down the Github model, public projects are free, private projects you pay for. Quite open to recommendations/opinions on what people would be willing to pay and how you want that priced

"Ubuntu" packages? The .deb format is a format used by all Debian-based GNU/Linux distributions.

The reason we say "Ubuntu" is that it's all we've had time to test against. I'm pretty sure the way we're presenting the repository metadata will work against Debian et. al., but I haven't tried it.

The goal is to support as many distributions as we can.

This link throws a 502: https://pkghub.io/users/andytinycat/projects/puppet-omnibus/...

I think this is happening because of the.. haphazard way we're showing the file list inside the deb. In future this will be cached. If you refresh again it usually works fine. Cheers for the report.

One killer feature would be to have a direct download link to each package. Installing outside the package manager isn't something you should do, but I've had to a few times (making netcat happy, etc).

If you are logged in and view a package (eg. https://pkghub.io/users/limi/projects/snzip/packages/f3d-snz...), there's a download link on the right under 'Meta'. It's just hidden if you are logged out, but the download link itself doesn't require you to be logged in, so you can copy paste that to a terminal (it does seem to lose the filename though, I've logged a bug for this).

This could be waaay better than Launchpad. And much nicer looking, too.

How?

The site has promised nothing new that I can see.. Launchpad already offers what is currently being promised.

In addition, the launchpad build infra is well designed and provides an assured build that is using the same architecutrure as builds for Ubuntu's primary archive (including gpg and network isolated build hosts)

Launchpad also has a receipe based build process, that (I haven't tried) could surely tie into Github?

On the face of it, this seems like a fun project for the developers, but nothing new.

I was mostly referring to the much nicer user interface.

I think we can assume that the developers/fans of launchpad don't care about UI/UX. :)

Agreed.

Heavy Launchpad for years here. Launchpad is the only way we can do we what we currently need to do (no, GitHub and others aren't enough, we need the Ubuntu and packages magic part).

That said, I hate it. I can't stand the UI, it's not that it's "ugly" (which it is), but that it's really not functional. Things are just hard to find and others don't work the way I expect them to.

Plus, it has a lot of 'missing features' I now expect because of things like GitHub like tagging issues, naming Bugs as "Issues" because I like that everything (anything really) is reported like a todo list (not just 'bugs' in the regular meaning of the word) and other things.

The fact is, Ubuntu are the only people seriously using Launchpad. ergo: Launchpad is Ubuntu's thing. Which is bad for everyone that isn't Ubuntu because it doesnt do anything for them and bad for Ubuntu because theres no fresh blood.

Not an Ubuntu hater here, just someone that hates stale software.

Can't I just use a simple S3 bucket to host a repository?

Yes, it requires some configuration though.

On the S3 side there is a Ruby gem that will send .deb's up to a bucket and put the right files in the right places.[1]

On the client side, apt-s3[2] provides the functionality for aptitude to download packages from S3 (Remember that S3 doesn't use normal HTTP basic so if you don't want your package public it needs to speak Amazon's language). A few people improved on this, and I have a straightforward fork and PPA built for this.[3]

I've been using all this in production for a few months and it has worked wonderfully. Jenkins builds the package and sends it up via deb-s3 and app servers have chef scripts that stop/start the daemon and update the package.

[1]https://github.com/krobertson/deb-s3

[2]https://github.com/kyleshank/apt-s3

[3]https://launchpad.net/~skye-book/+archive/apt-transport-s3

Love the simplicity of the design

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