Introducing Packosphere 🎉

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Say Hello To Packosphere :wave:

What (tl;dr)

Packosphere is an open source package repository browser, built as an alternative to Atmosphere. It’s primary goal is to provide a more feature rich repository browser that is able to be maintained and extended by our community.

Why

Since it’s creation by Percolate Studios, Atmosphere has been closed source and our community has been unable to explore the code, fix it’s bugs, or create new and innovative features. It has remained in this state even after being aquired from Percolate Studios by MDG, as well as after Tiny’s acquisition of Meteor.

Packosphere is the realization of a dream to have an open and transparent repository browser for Meteor packages. It’s source is yours to inspect and modify and you are fully welcome to get involved with creating new innovative features or fixing it’s bugs.

Who

Packosphere has up until now, for the most part, been built by myself. That being said…it is a community project, with code hosted under the Meteor-Community-Packages org, and it is yours to fix and extend.

Features

Currently the feature set is limited but very useful. You can search for packages by phrase as you would on Atmosphere, but you can also filter and sort the results. This is particularly useful for wading through packages that are outdated.

Once you’ve found the package you are looking for and browse it’s page, you can browse particular versions of it’s documentation by clicking any of the links in the version list. Also looking at the page, you will see how long ago it was published and if the package has not had an update published within the last couple years, you will see a warning stating that you should investigate it’s state before committing to it’s usage in your project.

Future

The possibilities are endless for features that could be added. The following is a list of things I’d love to see added in the near future.

  1. Community moderation
  2. Tagging/Categories
  3. Editable developer/org profiles
  4. Links to per-package learning resources

Other features are up to you… Just create a new Discussion under the ideas category OR clone the Repo and start working on a new pull request.

Takeaway

Go give it a try. Use it to find the best packages Meteor has to offer. If you find something broken or missing then you’re just a pull request away from solving your issue, and making Packosphere even better.

Hopefully you’ll enjoy finding and exploring new packages with Packosphere, and join me in making it as amazing as it can possibly be.

26 Likes
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thanks for sharing, snappy load times and looks way better then atmosphere. Awesome stuff man! I will be using this for sure

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That’s a huge improvement, well done :clap:

My only issue was I was getting very few results until I turned on the ‘show deprecated’ flag. Is this some official status or just based on when the project was last updated? Maybe it’s worth turning this on by default?

Also - sort on downloads (or github stars) or something like that would be nice. I’m not sure what atmosphere uses.

Other than that I think it’s great and fast :fire: . Really nice work :+1:

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There is an official deprecated flag that can be added to packages description, but I’m not sure if Packosphere is using it or in combination since the last update.

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Thanks :pray:

Yes, deprecation is an official status that can be set for a package by it’s author. This should not limit the result set by much. There are only a few packages that are deprecated at this point as far as I’m aware. The one setting that I find causes low result count is published within.

Yes, the ability to sort by different metrics is on my to-do list. I would have loved to gotten to them before this, but because most of the data comes from the repository, the structure is already defined. This means some of the data that I need to filter or sort on is in separate collections than the collection which is searched. This can be mitigated, but it requires denormalization, migrations and time to write them. Hopefully I will have more time in 2 weeks when my children head back to school.

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Actually I think you are on to something here… It does seem to be limiting the search results for some reason. I’ll look into this more and push out a fix ASAP.

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Should be all set now. Fixed and deployed.

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Really nice, I like it. Thank you.

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Amazing work @copleykj, thank you!

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amazing. thanks for the hard work

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This is lovely, but I’d really like to see atmosphere packages go away :frowning:

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That’s a giant step forward. Thanks, man! I never got why MDG neglected Atmosphere. Yes, they wanted to bring Meteor closer to the npm ecosystem (which worked), but Meteor packages still have their benefits - like the ability to adjust themselves to certain target platforms.

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Honestly I don’t think MDG purposfully neglected Atmosphere. I think they absorbed Percolate Studio with the intention of moving it forward, but shortly thereafter I think they pivoted to Apollo and everything else took a back seat.

I also believe that Meteor packages have unique abilities that set them apart from NPM. If this could be replicated using NPM I’m down for the move. Even if that did happen, I think we will continue to need a tool such as Atmosphere/Packosphere to help wade through the vast ocean that is NPM and help find these packages.

7 Likes