Depository

A NPM registry HTTP server that gets package information from GitHub and falls back to query the original NPM registry if a package is not provided from GitHub.

This project grabs node package information from GitHub through the GitHub API and provides this information through a similar data structure as the NPM registry for a particular node package. Depository can provide the NPM registry information from a GitHub project and its supplied tarballs, if the following conditions are met:

• the GitHub project name is used as the node package name
• versions of a particular GitHub project need to be tagged using semantic versioning
• there needs to be a package.json on the repository root
• the node package name in package.json needs to be equal to its GitHub project name
• the version-string in the package.json of a tagged version need to comply with the version of the tagname

Advantages

It is useful if you have to manage private NPM packages on GitHub and where you want to have a similar control as with public hosted NPM packages and you don't want to maintain varying git or tarball URLs. When using depository, installing a GitHub hosted NPM package will look like this:

npm install depository@~0.1

Or in a package.json:

{
  "name": "foo",
  "dependencies": {
    "depository": "~0.1.0"
  }
}

Another advantage of using depository is that the local NPM cache can be used more efficiently for non-published NPM packages, because package dependencies don't need to be downloaded / cloned completely (for the purpose of package verification) every time before they can be installed. This sometimes can take some time if you want to deploy / update a node application with several private dependencies.

Installation

npm install -g git://github.com/uxebu/depository.git

Usage

Starting the server (on port 4337) with public GitHub projects that are watched by user uxebu-system:

depository uxebu-system
# showing available GitHub projects and their versions

Using the depository server from another shell to install / query GitHub hosted NPM packages:

mkdir foo && cd foo
# will download the depository tarball from GitHub and colors from registry.npmjs.org
npm --registry=http://localhost:4337/ install depository colors
# showing details about the depository package
npm --registry=http://localhost:4337/ info depository
# jumping to the project site of this package
npm --registry=http://localhost:4337/ docs depository
# jumping to the issue tracker of this package
npm --registry=http://localhost:4337/ bugs depository

For a permanent change you can do the following

npm config set registry http://localhost:4337

Usage with private repositories

If you want to use depository for private GitHub repositories you need to provide the password of the GitHub user:

# providing all watched public and private repositories as npm packages
despository github_user -p github_password

When a private GitHub project tarball is requested through NPM it'll use the provided username and password for authentication (using basic authentication).

Command-line arguments

If you want to start the server on a different port or you want to query GitHub differently, check the command-line parameters through:

depository --help