cargo-http-registry

• Changelog

cargo-http-registry is a cargo registry allowing for quick publishing of crates when using crates.io is just not desired.

The application can be used to host a local registry to which crates can be published. Publishing of crates happens over a regular HTTP based API and can be interfaced with through regular cargo publish command. Crates are stored on the file system and no registry is necessary for accessing them.

Usage

To set up a local registry just run cargo-http-registry and provide a path to the registry's root directory:

$ cargo-http-registry /tmp/my-registry

The directory will be created if it does not exist and is populated as needed.

By default, the registry will listen only locally on 127.0.0.1, but command line options allow for overwriting this setting.

To make cargo aware of this registry, it needs to be made known in a cargo configuration file. The registry can be accessed via the local file system (by specifying the path to it) or over HTTP. The HTTP address and port can be found in the registry's config.json (e.g., /tmp/my-registry/config.json in the example; refer to the api key contents). Then open your ~/.cargo/config.toml (or a per-project configuration) and add the following lines:

[registries]
my-registry = { index = "http://127.0.0.1:35503/git" }
# Alternatively, access it via path:
my-registry = { index = "file:///tmp/my-registry" }

Also note that for HTTP access, you will need to enable the net.git-fetch-with-cli setting. That can be accomplished via config.toml as well, for example by adding:

[net]
git-fetch-with-cli = true

With that, you can now publish your crates to the registry and pull them from it.

$ cargo publish --registry my-registry
    Updating `/tmp/my-registry` index
   Packaging my-lib v0.1.0
   Verifying my-lib v0.1.0
   Compiling my-lib v0.1.0
    Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 0.09s
   Uploading my-lib v0.1.0

The created registry does not require any token checks. As such, if being asked to cargo login to the registry, any string may be used.

You can also adjust the crate to only allow publishing to a certain registry, which will prevent accidental pushes to crates.io:

--- Cargo.toml
+++ Cargo.toml
@@ -1,9 +1,10 @@
 [package]
 name = "my-lib"
 version = "0.1.0"
 authors = ["Daniel Mueller <deso@posteo.net>"]
 edition = "2018"
+publish = ["my-registry"]

 # See more keys and their definitions at https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/manifest.html

 [dependencies]

To consume the published crate from the local registry, simply set the registry key for the dependency:

--- Cargo.toml
+++ Cargo.toml
@@ -8,3 +8,4 @@ edition = "2018"

 [dependencies.my-lib]
 version = "0.1"
+registry = "my-registry"

Note that cargo-http-registry is not meant to be a cargo subcommand and cannot be used as such.

Note furthermore that the registry is meant to be used in a trusted setting, such as on a single computer or local home network. The reason being that, by design, it does not have any authentication scheme present and no attempts of hardening the code have been undertaken.

Docker

To run the registry in a Docker container:

docker run -p 35504:35504 ghcr.io/d-e-s-o/cargo-http-registry:latest /tmp/test-registry --addr 0.0.0.0:35504

To run cargo-http-registry in a docker compose file:

version: "3"

services:
  registry:
    image: ghcr.io/d-e-s-o/cargo-http-registry:latest
    container_name: cargo-registry
    restart: always
    # Arguments:
    # - Directory where the registry will store its data.
    #   Cargo-http-registry creates the directory if it does not exist.
    # - Server address.
    #   Note that 127.0.0.1 doesn't work in GitHub actions.
    #   Use 0.0.0.0 instead.
    command: /tmp/test-registry --addr 0.0.0.0:35504
    ports:
      - "35504:35504"