January 9, 2026
Static shock for package repos
Show HN: Repogen – a static site generator for package repositories
Dev tool promises one repo to rule them all—fans cheer, purists poke
TLDR: Repogen offers a one-stop tool for building software download sites across multiple Linux flavors with simple static hosting. The crowd is split between loving the simpler pipelines and questioning if it redoes Debian’s own tools, while a serverless rival pops up—verdict: promising, but it’s alpha, so tread lightly.
Repogen showed up on Hacker News with a bold pitch: a single command-line tool that builds software “stores” for Linux like Debian, RPM, Alpine, Arch, and Homebrew, all as static files you can host anywhere. Cue the crowd: half clapping, half squinting. The top vibe? “Finally, one tool to tame repo chaos.” But the purists came armed. eichin challenged, “How does the debian support compare to just using apt-ftparchive?”—translation: do we really need a Swiss‑army knife when a butter knife will slice just fine?
Fans loved the promise of fewer moving parts in continuous integration (robotic pipelines that publish software). tekacs confessed that “every extra tooling combo in CI can be a real PITA,” and Repogen’s incremental mode—add new packages without rebuilding the world—had people nodding. The alpha label sparked playful side‑eye: great idea, but maybe don’t anchor your production ship to it yet.
Meanwhile, a mini‑showdown brewed when bketelsen plugged plow, a serverless, Debian‑only rival. He noted GitHub Pages doesn’t support large files well, hinting Repogen’s static generator might win when packages get chunky. Bonus geek points for built‑in signing (cryptographic trust), and support for unsigned repos that still play nice with newer Debian quirks. Drama level: mild, humor level: medium, usefulness level: high.
Key Points
- •Repogen is an alpha-stage CLI tool that generates static repositories for Debian/APT, RPM/Yum, Alpine/APK, Arch/Pacman, and Homebrew.
- •It auto-detects packages via magic bytes, creates required metadata, and supports repository signing with GPG (Debian/RPM/Pacman) or RSA (Alpine).
- •Unsigned repositories are supported by always generating InRelease files, meeting Debian Trixie requirements and working with apt trusted=yes.
- •Installation from source uses GitHub and Go 1.23+, with basic usage to scan directories and generate repositories, including verbose mode.
- •Incremental mode reads existing metadata, adds only new packages, handles conflicts, re-generates metadata, re-signs if enabled, and provides S3 workflow examples for Debian, RPM, and Pacman.