Apothecary

A simple, self-hosted Elixir package respository.

Features

Apothecary supports the following features:

• [ X ] Upload multiple package versions of a single library
• [ X ] Upload documents for each version of a library contained in Apothecary
• [ X ] Search packages
• [ ] Search documents

Setup

Apothecary requires a few one-time steps to get running.

Directory Structure

On your host machine, create a directory for Apothercary to store files.

$ cd /path/where/you/want/apothecary/files/to/live
$ mkdir -p apothercary/public
$ tree .
.
└── apothecary
    └── public

2 directories, 0 files

By default, Apothercary will look for /apothecary as a root directory, but you can supply a custom path and directory by setting APOTHECARY_DIRECTORY. In either case, the directory must contain a public/ directory at its top level. If you are running Apothecary as a Docker container, the Apothecary directory can live anywhere on the host system and simply be mounted at /apothecary inside the container without requiring any configuration changes.

Private Key

A private key is used by Apothecary to sign packages and ensure integrity.

Inside the Apothecary directory, create a private key with the following command:

$ openssl genrsa -out private_key.pem

If the key file is located in the top level of your Apothecary directory and named private_key.pem, it will be automatically picked up. Otherwise, you can supply the path and filename by setting APOTHECARY_PRIVATE_KEY.

Repository Name

By default, Apothecary will use apothecary as the repository name, which can be changed by setting APOTHECARY_REPO_NAME. The repository name is used in your mix.exs files to pull packages from Apothecary, i.e.:

defp deps() do
  {:foo_bar, "~> 1.0", repo: "apothecary"}
end

If you were to change the repository name to acme, i.e. APOTHECARY_REPO_NAME=acme:

defp deps() do
  {:foo_bar, "~> 1.0", repo: "acme"}
end

Apothecary User

This step only applies if you are running Apothecary as a Docker container.

The container runs as an apothercary user, which requires a matching user on the host system with read/write permissions to the Apothecary directory.

Running

The examples below assume the Apothecary directory is setup at /home/apothecary on the host machine, containing a public/ directory and a private key named private_key.pem:

$ cd /home/apothecary
$ tree .
.
├── private_key.pem
└── public

1 directory, 1 file

Running Locally

$ APOTHECARY_DIRECTORY=/home/apothecary mix phx.server

Docker Build and Run

$ docker build -t apothecary .
$ docker run -p 4000:4000 -v /home/apothecary:/apothecary apothecary:latest

File Storage and Backups

Apothecary will write packages and docs to the public directory under the Apothecary directory. Packages are stored in public/tarballs and docs are stored in public/docs. While other files and directories will be created and changed whenever the registry is built, tarballs and docs are the only directories that need to be backed-up for the registry to be properly restored. The registry is rebuilt on startup and whenever packages are added, updated, or deleted, so there's no need to backup other data (although it won't hurt anything).

Acknowledgements

Dashbit