GitHub announces Package Registry: A new package management service

Github is widely used for code management, changes tracking and version control. It’s a website and cloud-based service that has made a lot of things quite simpler and easier for developers.

GitHub Announces GitHub Package Registry

According to a recent update by TechCrunch, Github announced a new package management service that let organizations and developers to easily generate ‘packages’ from their code. The company called it Github Package Registry, a service that allows developers to publish public or private packages next to their source code.

“GitHub Package Registry is compatible with common package management clients so you can publish packages with your choice of tools,” explains Simina Pasat, director of Product Management at GitHub.

Also Read: What is Git and GitHub? Important Commands for Programmers

The latest Package Registry is currently available in beta and will be always available for free. It’s open-source and compatible Java (Maven), JavaScript (npm), Ruby (RubyGems), .NET (NuGet) and Docker images. The company also has plans to extend its support for more languages and tools in the future. Packages hosted on GitHub includes detailed insights such as download statistics and project or package history.

Package Registry Features

Going a little deeper, the GitHub Package Registry comes with a lot of other useful and customization options. It allows you to publish multiple packages of different types for more complex repositories. You can also customize publishing and post-publishing tasks using webhooks and GitHub Actions.

The new Package Registry has a unified identity and permissions. It means packages on GitHub inherit the visibility and permissions from the repository. If you are an organization, you no longer need to maintain separate package registry and mirror permissions across systems.

You can easily use the same credentials across different systems for code and packages. Using the same tools to manage access permissions makes everything quite simple and easy.

Also Read: Top 10 Most Popular Open Source Projects on GitHub

“This is really outstanding. GitHub Package Registry separates the registry from the artifact storage, which is the right way to do it. The registry should be quick to update because it’s only a pointer. The artifact storage will be under my control. Credentials and security should be easier to deal with. I really hope this works out.” commented a developer on a thread on Hacker News.

There are also many other developers who are enthusiastic about the new GitHub Package Registry. Overall, now you can also use GitHub as a CDN of sorts to serve packages, for free.