In this post you will get a short introduction and my personal assessment on how the new Packages component in CodeCatalyst can help you to set up your complete SDLC in Amazon CodeCatalyst.

Only npm supported – a early launch to show what we can expect going forward and to get feedback from users?

With the initial launch Amazon CodeCatalyst allows to manage npm package repositories inside CodeCatalyst. When seing this for the first time I was a bit concerned that this decision – to initially launch with only npm support – will not help a lot, as I expect that organizations would need to store other type of artifacts (jar files, containers, python paackages, …). But I think that at least for Cloud Native Projects that use typescript this will solve the problem of storing artifacts and accessing them natively within CodeCatalyst. Let’s look at how they can be used today.

Using packages repositories in CodeCatalyst

Today you can set up package repositories in CodeCatalyst and connect to upstream (public or private) repositories. You can also change the sort order and the upstream order of the package repositories. The documentation covers the different possibilities to set up repositories very well. You can access the package repositories from your local machine by setting up the connection locally

npm config set registry https://packages.region.codecatalyst.aws/npm/space-name/proj-name/repo-name/

After setting up multiple repositories you can set the order of retrieval and usage. You can also set it up as a “pass-through” repository and allow access to public repositories.

Using packages in CodeCatalyst

Packages in CodeCatalyst are integrated with workflows. You can read or store packages with native actions or by setting up the npm repository manually.

You can also read and publish packages from other systems by using Personal Access Tokens (PAT). The documentation outlines currently supported client commands.

The CodeCatalyst workflows will by default use the set up repositories that you have set up within CodeCatalyst.

What I think we need next in packages

With the launch of the packages component in CodeCatalyst AWS has added a definately missing functionality in CodeCatalyst. Users are not able to store artifacts and share them within a space which makes it possible to create, re-use and deploy immutable artifacts natively within the tool.

This is a much needed functionality, but as I already mentioned, I believe that limiting this to npm packages only limits the use cases for it. I would have expected npm, python and docker support at launch and was a bit disappointed that this was not included.

I do also believe that the “packages” functionality should be better integrated and allow further configuration options, especially when loading/reading packages from upstream repositories – e.g. being able to limit to only certain licences or ensuring that packages included are still “supported” (and regularly updated) or security-scanned.

These type of functionalities would have made the new option “meaningful” and would have empowered developers to build better software too.

I can imagine that we will see python, java and dockersupport pretty soon due to these reasons and it would be great to also support “internal” repositories as “upstream” repositories.

How do YOU think that this new functionality will help you to adapt CodeCatalyst?
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