New APT and YUM repository and publishing system

[FooBarWidget]

Today we launched a new APT and YUM repository for Fullstaq Ruby, as well as a new CI/CD process for testing and publishing packages.

This is a big deal because Bintray — on which we hosted our packages — sunsetted on March 31.

We found that there are no good hosted alternatives to Bintray, which meant that we needed to develop an alternatives ourselves. But building an APT/YUM repository and a corresponding publishing process is actually very difficult and a lot of work, riddled with many caveats. Just putting up a repository is easy; making the repository and publishing process reliable, highly available, consistent, secure and playing well with CI/CD is the hard part.

After many weeks of hard work, this effort is now finally done. In the following technical document, I describe how our APT/YUM repository is set up and how the publishing process works. Special attention was given to the following problems:

• Atomic publishing
• Strong consistency
• Concurrency safe publishing
• Segregated, temporary repositories for testing
• Production data parity during testing
• Preservation of old package versions
• Optional overwrite protection
• Backups

This could be a good inspiration for others looking to setup a reliable APT/YUM repository and publishing process.

Read all about it here: APT and YUM repository setup

[mperham]

I’ve done about 20% of this for my own products and it’s a huge PITA. Thank you Hongli and team for this amazing work. 😎