PyPI in 2025: A Year in Review(blog.pypi.org) |
PyPI in 2025: A Year in Review(blog.pypi.org) |
Why do people come up with such unbelievably complex solutions that don’t actually achieve what a simple solution could do?
Trusted Publishing approximately involves a service like GitHub proving to somebody that some release artifact came from a GitHub Actions workflow file with a particular name, possibly in a particular commit. Never mind that GitHub Actions is an unbelievable security nightmare and that it’s probably not particularly hard for a malicious holder of GitHub credentials to stealthily or even completely silently compromise their own Actions workflow to produce malicious output.
But even ignoring that, it’s wildly unclear what is “trusted”. PyPI encourages developers to also use “attestations”. Read this and try to tell me what is being attested to:
https://docs.pypi.org/attestations/producing-attestations/
But I did learn that this is based on Sigstore. Sigstore is very impressive: it’s a system by which GitHub can attest via OIDC to various state, and a service called Fulcio (which we’re supposed to trust) uses its secret key to sign a message stating that GitHub did so at a certain time. (The OIDC transcript itself is not a durable attestation.) There’s even a transparency log (which is a separate system called Rekor maintained by the same organization). Except that, for some reason, Fulcio doesn’t do that at all. Instead it issues an X.509 certificate with an expiration in the near future where the certificate fields encode whatever GitHub attested to in its OIDC exchange, and the Sigstore client (which is hopefully a bit trustworthy) is supposed to use the private key (which it knows, in the clear, but is supposed to immediate forget) to sign a message that is associated with the release artifact or whatever else is being attested to. And then a separate transparency log records the signature and supposedly timestamps it so everyone one can verify the attestation later even though the certificate is expired! Why not just sign the message on the Fulcio server (which has an HSM, hopefully) directly?
All of this is trying to cryptographically tie a package on PyPI.org to a git tag. But: why not just do it directly? For most pure Python packages, which is a whole lot of packages, the distribution artifact is literally a zip file containing files from git, verbatim, plus some metadata. PyPI could check the GitHub immutable tag, read the commit hash, and verify the whole chain of hashes from the files to the tree to the commit. Or PyPI could even run the build process itself in a sandbox. (If people care about .pyc files, PyPI could regenerate them (again, in a sandbox), but omitting them might make sense too — after all, uv doesn’t even build them by default.) This would give much stronger security properties with a much more comprehensible system and no dependence on the rather awful security properties of GitHub Actions.
> PyPI could check the GitHub immutable tag, read the commit hash, and verify the whole chain of hashes from the files to the tree to the commit.
Tags are neither immutable nor durable on GitHub. This also breaks in the presence of any non-trivial build backend, including anything that produces a non-pure-Python wheel. Complexity is often bad, but just about every complex aspect of PyPI's attestation scheme has a reason behind it.
Why not Just(TM) enforce a reproducible build process? That brings some of its own challenges, but would represent a real upgrade over building out some Swiss cheese like this.
(I think the biggest blocker on CLI search isn’t infrastructure, but that there’s no clear agreement on the value of CLI search without a clear scope of what that search would do. Just listing matches over the package names would be less useful than structured metadata search for example, but the latter makes a lot of assumptions about the availability of structured metadata!)
However, I get a lot of mileage out of package repository search with package managers like pacman, apt, brew, winget, chocolatey and npm.
> I think the biggest blocker on CLI search isn’t infrastructure
It's why it was shut down, the API was getting hammered and it cost too much to run at a reasonable speed and implement rate limiting or whatever.
For simple use cases, you have the web search, and you can curl it.
> More than 130,000 new projects created
Is there any way to prevent PyPI from becoming a morass of supply chain attacks like NPM etc.? The cited security measures (though some of them like domain resurrection protection are probably very good ideas) seem like they won't, but it also seems like a very hard problem to solve, given the vast scale as well as core issues like malicious (but seemingly innocuous) upstream commits.
Side issue: anyone else seeing that none of the links in the article work? They're all 404s.
Happy New Year!
That's something like triple the amount from 2023, yes?
Sort of: the original search API used a POST and was structured with XML-RPC. PyPI’s operators went to great efforts to scale it, but that wasn’t a great starting point. A search API designed around caching (like the one used on PyPI’s web UI) wouldn’t have those problems.
Search is an unbounded context and does not lend itself to caching very well, as every search can contain anything
And anyway, hit rates are going to be pretty good. You're not taking arbitrary queries, the domain is pretty narrow. Half the queries are going to be for requests, pytorch, numpy, httpx, and the other usual suspects.
(Which isn’t to say I disagree with you about scale not being the main issue, just to offer some nuance. Another piece of nuance is the fact that distributions are the source of metadata but users think in terms of projects/releases.)
The moment you expose that same service to a ubiquitous CLI like pip, the workload changes qualitatively.
PyPI has the /simple endpoint that the CDN can handle.
It’s PyPI philosophy that search happens on the website and pip has aligned to that. Pip doesn’t want to make a web scraper understandably so the function of searching remains disabled
Why would you build a dedicated tool for this instead of just using a search engine? If I'm looking for a specific keyword in some project's very long README I'm searching kagi, not npm.
I'd expect that the most you should be indexing is the data in the project metadata (setup.py). That could be unbounded but I can't think of a compelling reason not to truncate it beyond a reasonable length.
(Note PyPI can’t index metadata from a `setup.py` however, since that would involve running arbitrary code. PyPI needs to be given structured metadata, and not all distributions provide that.)
Even including those, it's what? Sub-20-30GB.
2. apt repositories are cryptographically signed, centrally controlled, and legally accountable.
3. apt search is understood to be approximate, distro-scoped, and slow-moving. Results change slowly and rarely break scripts. PyPI search rankings change frequently by necessity
4. Turning PyPI search into an apt-like experience would require distributing a signed, periodically refreshed global metadata corpus to every client. At PyPI’s scale, that is nontrivial in bandwidth, storage, and governance terms
5. apt search works because the repository is curated, finite, and opinionated
You can Merklize “what files exist”; you can’t realistically Merklize “what should rank for this query today” without freezing semantics and turning CLI search into a hard API contract.