Show HN: Artifact Keeper – Open-Source Artifactory/Nexus Alternative in Rust

bsgeraci · 2026-02-06T04:12:59.000Z

I'm a software engineer who keeps getting pulled into DevOps no matter how hard I try to escape it. I recently moved into a Lead DevOps Engineer role writing tooling to automate a lot of the pain away. On my own time outside of work, I built Artifact Keeper — a self-hosted artifact registry that supports 45+ package formats. Security scanning, SSO, replication, WASM plugins — it's all in the MIT-licensed release. No enterprise tier. No feature gates. No surprise invoices.Your package managers — pip, npm, docker, cargo, helm, go, all of them — talk directly to it using their native protocols. Security scanning with Trivy, Grype, and OpenSCAP is built in, with a policy engine that can quarantine bad artifacts before they hit your builds. And if you need a format it doesn't support yet, there's a WASM plugin system so you can add your own without forking the backend.Why I built it:Part of what pulled me into computers in the first place was open source. I grew up poor in New Orleans, and the only hardware I had access to in the early 2000s were some Compaq Pentium IIs my dad brought home after his work was tossing them out. I put Linux on them, and it ran circles around Windows 2000 and Millennium on that low-end hardware. That experience taught me that the best software is software that's open for everyone to see, use, and that actually runs well on whatever you've got.Fast forward to today, and I see the same pattern everywhere: GitLab, JFrog, Harbor, and others ship a limited "community" edition and then hide the features teams actually need behind some paywall. I get it — paychecks have to come from somewhere. But I wanted to prove that a fully-featured artifact registry could exist as genuinely open-source software. Every feature. No exceptions.The specific features came from real pain points. Artifactory's search is painfully slow — that's why I integrated Meilisearch. Security scanning that doesn't require a separate enterprise license was another big one. And I wanted replication that didn't need a central coordinator — so I built a peer mesh where any node can replicate to any other node. I haven't deployed this at work yet — right now I'm running it at home for my personal projects — but I'd love to see it tested at scale, and that's a big part of why I'm sharing it here.The AI story (I'm going to be honest about this):I built this in about three weeks using Claude Code. I know a lot of you will say this is probably vibe coding garbage — but if that's the case, it's an impressive pile of vibe coding garbage. Go look at the codebase. The backend is ~80% Rust with 429 unit tests, 33 PostgreSQL migrations, a layered architecture, and a full CI/CD pipeline with E2E tests, stress testing, and failure injection.AI didn't make the design decisions for me. I still had to design the WASM plugin system, figure out how the scanning engines complement each other, and architect the mesh replication. Years of domain knowledge drove the design — AI just let me build it way faster. I'm floored at what these tools make possible for a tinkerer and security nerd like me.Tech stack: Rust on Axum, PostgreSQL 16, Meilisearch, Trivy + Grype + OpenSCAP, Wasmtime WASM plugins (hot-reloadable), mesh replication with chunked transfers. Frontend is Next.js 15 plus native Swift (iOS/macOS) and Kotlin (Android) apps. OpenAPI 3.1 spec with auto-generated TypeScript and Rust SDKs.Try it: git clone https://github.com/artifact-keeper/artifact-keeper.git cd artifact-keeper docker compose up -d Then visit http://localhost:30080Live demo: https://demo.artifactkeeper.com Docs: https://artifactkeeper.com/docs/I'd love any feedback — what you think of the approach, what you'd want to see, what you hate about Artifactory or Nexus that you wish someone would just fix. It doesn't have to be a PR. Open an issue, start a discussion, or just tell me here.https://github.com/artifact-keeper

antonyh 147 days ago |

I appreciate the honesty about using Claude and the time it took to build this, and it shows how things can look when guided by someone who knows what they are doing.

On the other hand, it also shows that it took three weeks, so why should I use this instead of building a custom toolchain myself that is optimised for what I need and actually use? Trimming away the 45+ formats to the 5 or so that matter to my project. It raises the question - is 'enterprise' software doomed in favour of a proliferation of custom built services where everybody has something unique, or is the real value in the 'support' packages and SLAs? Will devs adopt this and put 'Artifact Keeper' on their CV, or will they put 'built an artifact toolchain with Claude'?

But then again, kudos to you for building something that can (and probably should) eat the lunch of the enterprise-grade tools that are simply unaffordable to small business, individual contractors, and underfunded teams. Truth be told, I'm not going to build my own, so this is certainly something I want to put in a sandbox and try out, and also this is inspirational and may finally convince me that I should give Claude a fair go if it's capable of being guided to create high quality output.

raphinou 147 days ago | |

I'm impressed with the speed of development. I didn't take a look at the quality of the code though. I'm using glm a Kimi k2.5, and I have a lot of corrections to apply to the code. Is Claude that better? Or is my process bad? OP: what's your development process?

antonyh 147 days ago | | |

I've not done enough Rust to truly know, but it looks reasonable from looking at the tests, a few models, some implementation code.

It doesn't use the 'unsafe' keyword anywhere, but that's not necessarily an indicator. Uses unsafe-libyaml which is like what it sounds (a hacky port of libyaml) but is no longer maintained (archived on GH in March 2024), and may have better choices. An SBOM would highlight these dependencies better than me doing random searches through the code.

I'm not sure I'd have put a default in the OIDC callback to localhost, that's about the only thing I've seen in a quick 5-minute skim through. I do like the comments and the lack of emojis :-)

I too would like to know the process, if OP is willing to share.

bsgeraci 147 days ago | | |

Claude is... unfortunetly... that much better. They really know how to use the tools that integrate into CLI that just makes the flow so much better.

The only extra stuff I am doing now is beads. https://github.com/steveyegge/beads

I was using speckit and ralph-loop but think anthropic baked in that ralph-loop. Basically a dumb while true until you break with the condition.

bsgeraci 147 days ago | |

I would say do not trust it, but use it and try it. Hopefully over time I can build trust by people using it.

antonyh 147 days ago | | |

Trust it to proxy artifacts from the web? Yes I think so.

Trust it not to leak credentials? No, that's something that is never taken for granted.

Trust it to hold a full history of uploaded binaries? That depends on the value of the releases. For incubator work, or web projects, or even Appstore apps where it's released to those stores to manage, maybe there should be enough trust. I just wouldn't use it for code where I want access to many stable versions, and I wouldn't put it publicly on the web either - not that I would do so with Sonatype Nexus without vendor support and many safeguards. I think it'll earn trust over time, once folk are convinced to use it for real workloads.

There's a lot of forms of trust.

0x457 147 days ago | |

Coding agents changed "build vs buy" dynamics in my opinion. Hopefully it will result in SaaS dropping pay-gating SSO.

jdjdndbdhsjsb 146 days ago | | |

Nah they will go completely saas in the cloud

esafak 147 days ago | |

Why would you re-invent the wheel? Are the existing options that bad?

bsgeraci 147 days ago | | |

There is no exsiting option :) unless you know where one is at. Artifactory OSS is a joke, and no other product is out there. Trust me I hate reinvinting the wheel... I rather take a nice wheel and use it.

If you find an existing full blown artifactory alternative that is opensource let me know.

stroebs 147 days ago |

I’m a fairly heavy user of the JFrog platform with Enterprise+, Xray, their new Curation license, and my org is spending in excess of $500k/year on Artifact storage. Not including my time babysitting it. I’d love to see the end of it, and I hope you manage to build a community around this.

Part of the reason we pay the big license fee is so we have someone to turn to when it inevitably breaks because we’ve used it in a way nobody has before. In Jan last year we were using 30TB of artifact storage in S3. That’s 140TB today.

Where do you get your CVE data? Would built artifacts have their CVEs updated after the fact? Do you have blocking policies on artifacts based on CVEs, licenses, artifact age, etc?

kamma4434 147 days ago |

I have been looking for ways to only use local packages for our software builds. I am looking for something that can act as a local cache for Java and NPM packages. The idea would be that developers can only use packages belonging to the allowed set for development, and there is a vetting process where packages are added to the allowed set (or removed).

I have been playing with the idea of using a single git repository to host them, Java packages as an Ivy repository and JavaScript packages as simply the contents of node_modules.

Anybody does something similar?

figmert 147 days ago |

I've been wanting something like this that isn't artifactory (I've ran it in previous companies, it's not a great experience), so I had been thinking of doing it myself, but never bothered. One idea I had is to write a proxy that essentially translates the various package manager endpoints into OCI registry, thus causing everything to be stored on any OCI backend. My thinking was this way you could in theory use any OCI backend (including ready available, battle-tested self-hosted applications), but this proxy would never need it's own state, thus making it (hopefully) easier to run.

Now that you've implemented, was there a reason you didn't go for such an approach so that you would worry about less as someone hosting something like this?

bsgeraci 147 days ago | |

I have used oras, and that might be an interesting approach but not sure how it would work with search , version listing, dependenciton resolution, metadata quirere, permissions, and audit logs.

Are you sugesting some hybrid approach?

j1elo 147 days ago |

Question about the license choice: now that we're past so many projects that started up as FOSS but with a longer-term plan of monetization and/or corporate-tier support level, which saw their choice of license allowing other bigger players to just get the code and run a competing service with proprietary extensions (which is what something so exceedingly open as MIT allows), isn't there any worry that this could happen again here?

I'm curious if AGPL shouldn't be more common (even though it's not a silver bullet), but MIT projects with foreseeable needs of some monetization to survive long term never ceased to show up, despite so many FOSS drama in the last couple years.

bsgeraci 147 days ago | |

Great question and I think about this a lot. I chose MIT deliberately and I'll explain why.

My graduate research focused on common computer security misconceptions — one of the biggest being that open source is inherently insecure. The algorithms and systems we trust most are the ones open to public scrutiny. AES was selected through an open competition where every candidate was published for the world to attack. TLS, SHA-256, RSA — their security comes from transparency, not obscurity. I believe the same applies to software infrastructure.

Could a bigger player take this and run a competing service? Sure, MIT allows that. But I'd rather have the code out there being used, audited, and improved than restrict it to protect a business model I don't even have yet. If someone like AWS wraps this in a managed service, that honestly means I built something worth wrapping — and the open version still exists for anyone who wants to self-host.

I've thought about the Canonical model — paid support around a free product — and I might go there someday. But I don't have years of production use behind this yet. We all start somewhere. Right now I'd rather focus on making the software good and building a community around it than optimizing a license for a monetization strategy that doesn't exist.

AGPL is a valid choice and I respect projects that use it. But for me, MIT is a statement about what I actually care about — the code being out there for everyone.

j1elo 147 days ago | | |

Yours is truly an informed and well thought out decision! I appreciate it, and enjoyed reading your reasoning; thanks for the clarity and props for the whole effort of this project!

I agree that an extreme of the permisiveness is indeed the most likely to attract major usage. On the other hand, its freedom is more fragile. All is well with each project striking the preferred balance in that axis.

no_circuit 147 days ago |

Impressive looking project generated with AI help. Have similar goals of having an artifacts system myself.

I think the approach of multi-format, multi-UI, and new (to you) programming language isn't optimal even with AI help. Any mistake that is made in the API design or internal architecture will impact time and cost since everything will need to be refactored and tested.

The approach I'm trying to take for my own projects is to create a polished vertical slice and then ask the AI to replicate it for other formats / vertical slices. Are there any immediate use cases to even use and maintain a UI?

So a few comments on the code:

- feature claims rate limiting, but the code seems unused other than in unit tests... if so why wasn't this dead code detected?

- should probably follow Google/Buf style guide on protos and directory structure for them

- besides protos, we probably need to rely more on openapi spec as well for code generation to save on AI costs, I see openapi spec was only used as task input for the AI?

- if the AI isn't writing a postgres replacement for us, why have it write anything to do with auth as well? perhaps have setup instructions to use something like Keycloak or the Ory system?

ashishbijlani 147 days ago |

This is a great initiative. Thanks for sharing! I will use it to create my personal cache of package registries (beyond obvious advantages of caching, it can also mitigate typo-squatting attacks).

BTW, if there's an interest, I'd love to collaborate and integrate Packj [1] audit for malware scans.

1. Packj (https://github.com/ossillate-inc/packj) detects malicious PyPI/NPM/Ruby/PHP/etc. dependencies using behavioral analysis. It uses static+dynamic code analysis to scan for indicators of compromise (e.g., spawning of shell, use of SSH keys, network communication, use of decode+eval, etc). It also checks for several metadata attributes to detect bad actors (e.g., typo squatting).

jurgenburgen 147 days ago |

> Security scanning, SSO, replication, WASM plugins — it's all in the MIT-licensed release. No enterprise tier. No feature gates. No surprise invoices.

I think it’s cool that the OSS version has everything but I hope you’re considering adding an actual enterprise tier for paid support because from my past experience that’s the killer feature large enterprises care about.

If your OSS service becomes a mission-critical service (what an artifact repository usually is), a large org will anyways have to invest into a team that can operate and own it.

If throwing some money at the vendor takes away some of the responsibility (= less time spent by in-house team on ops) then paying for an enterprise support SLA is a feature, not a bug.

It would be great to see more competition in the space even though my current team isn’t working with this problem!

mqus 147 days ago |

I just counted the list of supported formats and landed at 35. This is still impressive, but if even this simple fact is wrong in the project description("40+ formats!!!"), I have no faith at all that any of this actually works.

bsgeraci 146 days ago | |

yea so technically some of the formats are aliased :)

https://artifactkeeper.com/docs/package-formats/ Check this, you should see around 35 then 9 alias's that map to the other ones.

awakeasleep 147 days ago | |

Well the enterprise alternatives dont really work either

knuit 146 days ago |

I'll certainly keep an eye on this to see if a community forms around it.

Internally we host ~17 million artifacts (~200TB) in Artifactory with X-Ray that we self-host in AWS and backed by S3.

We've experienced pain in the management of the solution and while we're not getting killed on price, they keep trying to upsell on their security add-ons.

I've only glanced at the docs, but I'm curious how the security aspects scale with artifact count? Is autoscaling (via EC2 or ECS/EKS) a possibility with the various components?

cadamsdotcom 147 days ago |

Mad props on building with Claude Code but doing thoughtful design, and using tests to take yourself out of the loop but still thoughtfully architecting the important bits.

These tools can’t architect clean solutions that cut out massive chunks of code, and they can’t talk to users and decide whether what they’re building makes sense. For that, we need a human touch.

But coding agents grant insane leverage if they’re just told when they got it wrong and given a chance to get it right.

bsgeraci 147 days ago | |

I think we are in a time where we can make amazing things happen. I always go back to my Star Trek shows. We can now ask a computer to make a program for us. That is what I have been dreaming of. Now we are not at that level and lots of thought and experience goes into helping guide claude code but it is sometimes sci-fi like. The code is more clean, more maintainable for even myself. Everytihng is always commented, complexity is reduced.

I think if you follow a few rules whenever making changes and using all the latest tools like linters, security checkers, end to end frameworks, and any other helpful tool you can really make stuff happen.

Multicomp 144 days ago |

I built out Nexus 2 years ago and have run Jfrog 4+ years ago, and now am back at the Artifact Repo choosing process again. I'm going to try to get away with AWS ECR for containerized artifacts to defer purchasing a proper versioned artifact repo, but I will be keeping a close eye on this one, I respect the work and design that went into this. I couldn't have done it better myself!

geauxvirtual 147 days ago |

How much of this code was actually reviewed? Doing a quick glance through some of the features being touted around SSO, there are a few vulnerabilities, and wonder if these actually work and have been tested with different providers.

* I say this as an engineer who has supported an authentication platform for years for a SAAS company and know not one IdP has implemented SAML the same as others.

bsgeraci 146 days ago | |

That is interesting, I have a good idea about setting up some red team agents and blueteam agents with claude code and seeing if we can improve security by testing things. In the pen test world these AI tools have basically beat all humans breaking into systems with no AI assistance.

If you have anymore details I would love to hear from your experience and what you think would be useful to look at. I will make a ticket based on this concern. I really want to make this as secure as we can and have people poke and do the code reviews. :)

Or analyse the code base. I am using security agents to harden the code base and testing end to end testing based on that.

Adding some security agents in the loop is a great idea!

visualphoenix 147 days ago |

Can this do 302 redirect to s3? One neat feature of artifactory edge is that the asset download can skip hitting the edge peer and go straight to s3.

Would be cool if this also could support the existing artifactory s3 backend format so you could just point this at your existing artifactory s3 bucket and migrate your db over to this.

Congrats on launching!

bsgeraci 147 days ago | |

https://github.com/orgs/artifact-keeper/discussions/34

I made this discussion here. Please jump on github and add some comments and maybe we can get this added :)

visualphoenix 145 days ago | | |

Thanks again for listening to the feedback and making these improvements! Especially the 302 redirect bit.

Would love to know if you’ve tested the hybrid migration mode against artifactory yet. Would be very very cool to have a way to run both of these side by side while evaluating the cutover. Maybe with a way to re-sync the artifactory db changes over periodically.

bsgeraci 146 days ago |

Want to thank everyone for taking the time to make comments here. I am using what was said to improve the code base.

Currently active in some refactors. If anyone wants to test ArtifactKeeper I recommend waiting for my 1.0.0.a2 release. Hopefully by the end of the weekend.

Thanks again!!!

nullocator 147 days ago |

I see that this supports wasm plugins which is a neat feature, have you considered adding support for wasm plugins stored as oci images potentially in the registry itself? I looked at the documentation and it didn't seem like this was an option.

bsgeraci 147 days ago | |

That is a great idea!

I made a discussion here :) I can keep you posted but if you have a github account just make a commet there follow so you stay up to date with that change.

https://github.com/orgs/artifact-keeper/discussions/36

jamesvnz 147 days ago |

Nice work.. I'm building the same thing right now. Partly because we need this and don't have the budget for Artifactory etc., and mainly to test out largely hands free, agentic development.

bsgeraci 147 days ago | |

Feel free to use what I am building but I also think more people just need to try and build something. We are almost in a star trek style world where you are talking to a computer to make a holo deck promgram :) sorry for the trekkie talk.

My recommendation with testing out hands free agentic, know it is not fully hands free. I find my self babysitting alot of terminals going at once, like having a bunch of interns or junior devopers.

It is important to plan plan plan.

I want to eventually switch and play with self hosted models but for most agentic stuff Claude is killing it in terms of results.

seabass-salmon 147 days ago |

Long-term Nexus custodian here. Last year's licence rugpull by Sonatype had be thinking the same. I particularly loathe their new front page "malware" warning saying you have to contact them to find out what it is. Sure.

I've read the main readme so excuse if comments are covered already but key features and/or opportunities: - backend supporting Azure (Nexus has this under Pro though community does support S3 under community at least) - clear navigable S3 structure that could be sorted by a human if needed, like the on-disk backend of Nexus 2 used to have, not like Nexus' current organisation/obfuscation (which would be understandable but for...) - maintenance routines that actually work (Nexus' are a joke and very limited features for both cleanup and the task set leaving ever growing detritus). - having an automatically take the latest from upstreams is a big problem in the npm world; it would be a perfect fit to introduce this kind of staging concepts and window on upstream (proxied) repos - needs restful APIs and deep links to artifacts for ease of integration - we end up proxying other sources of files in a web proxy since there's no easy "pass through" via Nexus where we don't want to copy the current files into our DB or S3 but just want to pass the latest to the consumer. a direct proxy feature with URL remapping would be cool

Things I'd have to play around to understand what it does currently: - whether it has proper proxy and group support; composition is completely essential - whether that caching is sensible there (Nexus does a poor job, though it's a hard problem, when bad states get cached) - efficient (Maven) metadata generation (Nexus is abysmally slow) - whether rbac is clear over the repo structures (Nexus does ok here except everything is repo level AND the initial setup is very painful). - P2 consumption looks to be a supported format but P2 hosting I think was nerfed after Nexus v2.11 and some clients still use that - rpms added ("yum" to Nexus) but as with repo hierarchies would need to be assured they can be nested and will correctly produced merged repomd.xml and the like so they function properly

other comments: - having the security scanning in an open source tool would be amazing - it would be very hard to get clients to trust this without either a community and review process or a company (that "can be sued") behind it. I know it's very early days but it's a bit chicken and egg as if I can't use this on clients I wouldn't use for anything. Not that I am a valuable customer by myself, but I influence clients decisions who then need that support

westurner 147 days ago |

> native Swift (iOS/macOS) and Kotlin (Android) apps

CLI with journal of instructions, TUI?

bsgeraci 146 days ago | |

I really think my next step is a full on CLI/TUI :)

Basically I am using end points so automation can be done with just curl requests. But as a linux nerd I do enjoy my share of CLI/TUI's.

mrmattyboy 147 days ago |

Honestly, this is just awesome.

I've spent quite a long time looking at artifact storage, both for work and for personal use and this project literally scratches that itch. So featureful (assuming they're not placeholders ;) ) and yes, Claude Code, but still - the proof will be in whether it works (and how clean the codebase feels - you're making it sound promising :D ).

Very excited to try this - well done :)

bsgeraci 147 days ago | |

Thanks for the kind words! If you need any help please reach out. My contact info is on github and I am happy to support making this happen.

imcritic 147 days ago |

After reading the header - I had a glimmer of hope.

deknos 147 days ago |

you know artipie? it is only in java, but does a similar part.

will your stuff be really opensource?

bsgeraci 146 days ago | |

https://github.com/artifact-keeper

There are 7 or 8 repositories now in this org. Feel free to take, use, or help imrove the code. MIT Open Source.

deknos 145 days ago | | |

thanks. another question:

Would it be possible, that the storage of pypi/whatever is some s3 bucket, where you have it encrypted (with authentication), and when you deliver it to a client, you get it, decrypt it, test for authentication and deliver it to the client? the encryption is something that artipie is lacking sadly.

burakemir 147 days ago |

Thanks for sharing.

westurner 147 days ago |

Notes for solvers in this space;

Fedora recently moved to managing packages in Forgejo, a fork of Gitea and Gogs, a clone of the old GitHub UI. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45670055

Forgejo has an artifact registry for DEBs, RPMs, APKs,; and a Container Registry for OCI Containers.

Any type of artifact can be stored in an OCI container image registry. Any type of artifact can be signed/attested to with a short-lived signing key from sigstore.dev's or a self-hosted Rekor instance

Native container tools like bootc store host system images as a OCI container images.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44991636 :

> bootc-image-builder, ublue-os/image-template, ublue-os/akmods, ublue-os/toolboxes w/ quadlets and systemd

There are streaming container standards to boot containers that haven't finished downloading yet, and container shapshot artifacts too; Seekable OCI, eStargz, Nydus: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45270468

...

Forgejo can mirror git repos regularly or manually.

"Tell HN: GitHub will delete your private repo if you lose access to the original" re: `git clone --mirror` https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34603593

Python Packaging User Guide > Package index mirrors and caches > Existing projects: https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/guides/index-mirrors-...

> [ Cache, Mirror, Proxy ]

> [ mod_cache_disk (Apache), nginx_pypi_cache, pulp-python, ]

Pulp (RedHat,) mirrors and proxies a number of different types of packages. https://github.com/pulp

pulp_container, pulp_ostree, pulp_ansible, pulp_rpm, pulp_deb, pulp_npm, pulp_maven, pulp_r

pulp-operator for HA SPOF with k8s: https://github.com/pulp/pulp-operator

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44320936 re: cosign, Sigstore, TUF, SLSA; you have to pass this to get docker to check container image signatures

  DOCKER_CONTENT_TRUST=1

..

- integrate with Forgejo

- mirror git repos

- consider pulp's modular approach and deployment operator

- consider OCI for future packaging formats

- What SLSA recommends; check TUF, Sigstores, Trusted Publisher (OIDC) and GPG .asc signatures

And then also content-addressable networking might avoid some of the overhead and wasteful redundancy to checking the hash of each file in each signed package manifest.