Is Aptly still maintained?

[NielsH]

Hi,

We're considering switching to Aptly, however we are having some doubts because it seems somewhat abandoned; the last commits stop around october 2019 and when I look at the website regarding the Roadmap I see planned releases for Dec 2019 and Jun 2020 which appear to be out-of-date ( https://www.aptly.info/download/ ) since it has already been Dec 2019 of course.

Is it still maintained or no more?

Cheers

[sjquinney]

I've recently been wondering the same thing. The website is in a poor state with the tutorials having lost all the examples which makes it very hard to get started. Also questions on the mailing list go unanswered. Would be a shame as aptly looks really good compared to other tools which I've found lacking in features.

[adam-kosseck]

Take a look at the developer's Github activity, he is still very active just not on this project.
It seems he is working at a Kubernetes startup and doesn't have time for this project anymore.

What are the best alternatives to Aptly? Well I've tried both the aptmirror and debmirror CLI tools, at the time debmirror seemed more mature but didn't have the delta or lifecycle support that Aptly has. In the UI space I've tried both Foreman (katello) and its commercial (.deb focused) offshoot Orcharhino, both seemed promising and had all of the required features but had trouble working reliably in our admittedly highly complex environments. I tried asking Red Hat to stop removing .deb support from Satellite (since it's also based on Foreman/Katello) but had no luck there.

My next point of investigation was going to be Pulp3, as this is the CLI tool that Foreman/Katello & Orcharhino use under the hood...

[berendt]

@adam-kosseck We have also used Aptly so far and will now look at Pulp3 as we also need mirrors for Docker/Podman images and Ansible roles. I think Pulp3 is a good solution then. Aptly is definitely no longer an option for us.

[cgallay]

Hi, @adam-kosseck which alternative did you end up using?

[adam-kosseck]

I'm still using Aptly due to the amount of time I've already invested in wrapper scripts to automate processes across multiple environments.
However I remain keen to investigate Pulp 3 when time permits.

[seitzbg]

Any comments from either of the maintainers regarding Aptly? Would love to start using it but not if it is a dead project. Pulp3 looks interesting but no CLI right now (which isn't a deal breaker but that's why I want to use aptly).

[oberones]

For anyone considering using Pulp3, it's a great solution but it will not fill all of Aptly's use-cases. If you just need a way to create versioned repositories, either hosted or proxied, then Pulp3 is a great alternative. It has a really robust API and it does have a CLI or two out there floating around out there, along with client libraries for several languages. However, if you're looking to synchronize a repo with an S3 bucket in order to serve your content from an S3 endpoint, then Pulp3 is not going to work for you.

Also consider that the documentation for Pulp3 is still evolving and sometimes does not match the reality of whichever version of pulp-core you happen to be using. It's getting much, much better though. Definitely worth testing out and seeing if it will work for you.

[realtime-neil]

What are the best alternatives to Aptly? Well I've tried both the aptmirror and debmirror CLI tools, at the time debmirror seemed more mature but didn't have the delta or lifecycle support that Aptly has.

It's also worth noting that debmirror doesn't definitely does support https endpoints and has since 2013:

https://salsa.debian.org/debian/debmirror/-/commit/0f960002a81895a072e778e5d34b505a2e07f700

Welp, I guess I'm going back to that tool for my mirroring needs.

[pmhahn]

I just asked @smira by private mail about a missing feature; his answer contained this:

Hey Philipp, I'm no longer maintaining aptly, so I don't think I will be able to answer your question.

So at least from that point aptly looks dead.

[realtime-neil]

@pmhahn what kind of interest do you have (if any) in "adopting" this project? My expertise tends toward Debian packaging and not golang, otherwise I'd volunteer my services.

[berendt]

But then a public notice from @smira (a comment here in the issue) would be good and a corresponding note in the documentation, on the website and in the README.

Please check the following PRs: #926 aptly-dev/www.aptly.info#85

[berendt]

@realtime-neil We check from our side whether a further development of Aptly is in our interest. And whether we have the necessary knowledge and resources. Actually we like it quite a lot. But for the moment, I think that marking it as unmaintained would be correct.

[pmhahn]

@pmhahn what kind of interest do you have (if any) in "adopting" this project? My expertise tends toward Debian packaging and not golang, otherwise I'd volunteer my services.

I'm a Debian Developer (DD) myself, but completely new to golang. I just started learning it, but I consider myself to be far away from using it in production. For my work as Open Source Software Engineer I'm mostly a Python guy, but I'm also using C and perl for over 30 years.
My motivation for using aptly is currently motivated by my day job, where I need a Debian package repository until GitLab has its own Package Manager ready. Previously I've bad been using RepRepRe for other projects, but needed something more modern than that.
We're currently evaluating aptly as an alternative to apt-mirror, which we're still using, but it shows its age. I haven't yet looked at pulp which I only recently learned about.

So currently I lack the required golang knowledge, but consider me in if someone want to team-maintain aptly and is looking for more hands.

[karras]

Maybe we can throw some (virtual) money at @sliverc to accept some of the PRs. ;)

[cr1xu5]

For mirroring/caching there is also https://github.com/cybozu-go/aptutil