Offline-capable Package Manager App

[jimpick]

Discussion here: ipfs-inactive/package-managers#37

Stakeholders: Package Managers Working Group

Audience: People who would like to do some javascript development offline with only a cache of npm packages

Impact: We'd have a small demo to start some more discussion around the idea

[jimpick]

I did some brainstorming with @andrew last week, and we identified some different directions we could go with it...

An obvious package manager to start with would be npm via npm-on-ipfs.

The first thing to support would be a single developer caching a subset of npm packages so they can go offline and still do npm installs without Internet access.

Once that works, it would be nice to support the "camp scenario", where multiple developers go off into the woods without Internet access, but they still have peer-to-peer connectivity (eg. a wifi hotspot or bluetooth). One developer could have a cached subset of npm packages that they could share with the rest of the developers. If for some reason, a package wasn't cached, they could send a developer "back to town" to download it and bring it back to the camp.

Supporting just read-only caching would be the initial goal. Beyond that, it would be nice if developers could also "publish" new module updates or forks to their local repo while offline from the Internet. When they go back online, they should have the ability to publish again to the centralized npm repo.

[agentofuser]

Verdaccio enables local caching and publishing, and has an interface for plugging storage adapters. Might be worth looking into.

[victorb]

Project developed by Open-Registry that already fulfills everything talked about in this issue (well, except the publishing part): https://github.com/open-services/bolivar

Deployment model is simpler than npm-on-ipfs as well, as it ends up being just one binary that people can run directly.

[momack2]

@agentofuser - totally agree! see thread on Verdaccio here: ipfs-inactive/package-managers#38

[jimpick]

@victorb Bolivar sounds great!

Perhaps the goal for this mini-project should be to just describe the "scenario" in detail with some hard requirements, and then we can pick some of the existing current solutions and see how well they work?

[andrew]

I talked with @warpfork about this last week and he suggested the idea of a "how well does a package manager work offline" score card, which could be used to test existing implementations and highlight areas that need improvement.

[jimpick]

@andrew gave a nice demo today at the end of the GUI and In Web Browsers weekly call of a simple utility that will take the npm packages used by a single repository, and republish them to IPFS as a standalone repository. Very slick!

• https://github.com/andrew/ipfs-npm-republish

Still trying to get it to work here, but I like how simple the idea is.