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Managing Repositories

The proliferation of different repository formats and tools accessing them as well as the emergence of more publicly available repositories has triggered the need to manage access and usage of these repositories and the components they contain.

In addition, hosting your own private repositories for internal components has proven to be a very efficient methodology to exchange components during all phases of the software development life cycle. It is considered a best practice at this stage.

The task of managing all the repositories your development teams interact with can be supported by the use of a dedicated server application - a repository manager.

Put simply, a repository manager provides two core features:

  • the ability to proxy a remote repository and cache components saving both bandwidth and time required to retrieve a software component from a remote repository repeatedly

  • the ability the host a repository providing an organization with a deployment target for internal software components

Just as Source Code Management (SCM) tools are designed to manage source code, repository managers have been designed to manage and track external dependencies and components generated by your build.

Repository managers are an essential part of any enterprise or open-source software development effort, and they enable greater collaboration between developers and wider distribution of software, by facilitating the exchange and usage of binary components.

Once you start to rely on repositories, you realize how easy it is to add a dependency on an open source software library available in a public repository, and you might start to wonder how you can provide a similar level of convenience for your own developers. When you install a repository manager, you are bringing the power of a repository like the Central Repository into your organization. You can use it to proxy the Central Repositories and other repositories, and host your own repositories for internal and external use.

Capabilities of a Repository Manager

In addition to these two core features, a repository manager can support the following use cases:

  • allows you to manage binary software components through the software development life-cycle

  • search and catalogue software components

  • control component releases with rules and add automated notifications

  • integrate with external security systems, such as LDAP or Atlassian Crowd

  • manage component metadata

  • host components, not available in external repositories

  • control access to components and repositories

  • display component dependencies

  • browse component archive contents

Advantages of Using a Repository Manager

Using a repository manager provides a number of benefits including:

  • improved software build performance due to faster component download off the local repository manager

  • reduced bandwidth usage due to component caching

  • higher predictability and scalability due to limited dependency on external repositories

  • increased understanding of component usage due to centralized storage of all used components

  • simplified developer configuration due to central access configuration to remote repositories and components on the repository manager

  • unified method to provide components to consumers reducing complexity overheads

  • improved collaboration due the simplified exchange of binary components