Kellnr - The private crate registry

Kellnr is an open-source Rust registry for crates. Think of crates.io but on your own hardware.

Note

Find out more on: kellnr.io

Quickstart

The easiest way to get started is to use the Docker image. You can start kellnr with the following command:

docker run \
    -p 8000:8000 \
    -e "KELLNR_ORIGIN__HOSTNAME=localhost" ghcr.io/kellnr/kellnr:5.2.5

Fore more information about how to configure and run kellnr, check out the documentation.

You can find the latest binary releases here: Kellnr Binary Releases.

For the latest Docker images, check here: Kellnr Docker Images.

The latest Kubernetes Helm chart can be found here: Kellnr Helm Chart

Features

• Host crates: Kellnr can host crates. This means that you can upload your own crates to Kellnr and use them in your projects. No extra tooling required, cargo works out of the box.
• Web UI: Kellnr comes with a web UI to manage the crates. This makes it easy to upload new crates, manage the versions and see the documentation of the crates.
• Docs-rs support: Kellnr supports the docs.rs documentation service. This means that you can host your own documentation for your crates with Kellnr.
• Crates.io proxy: Kellnr can act as a proxy for crates.io. This means that you can use Kellnr as a cache for crates.io to speed up the download of crates.
• Build in Rust: Kellnr is written in Rust. This means that you can easily extend Kellnr with your own features or fix bugs. No other dependencies are needed.
• Multi-Db support: Kellnr supports multiple databases. You can use Sqlite or PostgreSQL as the storage backend for Kellnr.

Differences to crates.io

• Private: Kellnr is designed to be used in a corporate environment or home-labs. It is possible to host Kellnr on your own hardware, such that you can control the access to the crates.
• Easy to host: Kellnr is designed to be easy to host. It is possible to run Kellnr on a single machine, without the need for a complex setup. Stand-alone, Docker and Kubernetes deployments are supported.
• User management: Kellnr supports user management. This means that you can create users and assign them to own crates. This is useful in a corporate environment, where you want to control the access to the crates.

Why I created Kellnr

As a security engineer and researcher I fight vulnerabilities in software for a living. With Rust becoming more and more popular, I see a lot of potential in the language to write secure software. However, to adapt Rust in a corporate environment, I need to be able to control the dependencies of the software I write. This is where kellnr comes into play. I hope that kellnr can accelerate the adoption of Rust in corporate environments, by providing a secure and private registry for Rust crates. In the end, I want to make the world a little bit more secure by promoting the use of Rust.

Contribute

You are welcome to contribute to kellnr. Create an issue or a pull-request here on Github.

If you want to contribute with code, here are some hints to get you started.

Prerequisites

The following tools are needed to build kellnr: Rust, NPM / Node.js and Docker.

kellnr is written in Rust with a UI in vue.js. NPM and Node.js are only needed at build time, but not at runtime. The UI is hosted by kellnr itself, such that no Node.js is needed. Docker is needed for integration tests against the PostgreSQL backend.

Build Kellnr

The project uses just as a task runner. Check the justfile for all available tasks, or run just -l to see all available tasks.

# For all available tasks 
just -l

# Build the project (debug)
just build

# Build the project (release)
just build-release

# Build the frontend (result is placed in ./static)
just npm-build

# Test the project (without Docker integration tests, requires cargo-nextest)
just test

# Test the project (with Docker integration tests, requires cargo-nextest)
just test-all

# Run the project
just run

If you use Nix, you can use the provided flake.nix to build the project and start a development shell.

# Start a development shell
nix develop

# Build the project
nix build

Build options

The following environment variables can be set at compile time:

• KELLNR_VERSION: The version of kellnr currently being compiled (default: 0.0.0-unknown).
• KELLNR_CONFIG_DIR: The configuration directory (default: ./config, ../config, or ../../config).
• KELLNR_STATIC_DIR: The static html directory (default: ./static).

Sea ORM & PostgreSQL

kellnr uses Sqlite or PostreSQL as the storage backend for all crate related information. If you need a local PostgreSQL to test against, this Docker command sets one up on your local machine.

# Run local postgres container.
docker run -it --rm -p 5432:5432 -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=admin -e POSTGRES_USER=admin postgres

If you want to generate entities with Sea ORM from the database, run:

# in the folder, where the entities should be generated, where "kellnr-db" is the database name.
sea-orm-cli generate entity -u postgresql://admin:[email protected]/kellnr-db