I have been running a free version of Proget locally for years now. It served as a home for Nuget packages, Docker images, and Helm charts for my home lab projects. But, in an effort to slim down the apps that are running in my home lab, I took a look at some alternatives.
Where can I put my stuff?
When I logged in to my Proget instance and looked around, it occurred to me that I only had 3 types of feeds: Nuget packages, Docker images, and Helm charts. So to move off of Proget, I need to find replacements for all of these.
Helm Charts
Back in the heady days of using Octopus Deploy for my home lab, I used published Helm charts to deploy my applications. However, since I switched to a Gitops workflow with ArgoCD, I haven’t published a Helm chart in a few years. I deleted that feed in Proget. One down, two to go.
Nuget Packages
I have made a few different attempts to create Nuget packages for public consumption. A number of years ago, I tried publishing a data layer that was designed to be used across platforms (think APIs and mobile applications), but even I stopped using that in favor of Entity Framework Core and good old fashioned data models. More recently, I created some “platform” libraries to encapsulate some of the common code that I use in my APIs and other projects. They serve as utility libraries as well as a reference architecture for my professional work.
There are a number of options for hosting Nuget feeds, with varying costs depending on structure. I considered the following options:
- Azure DevOps Artifacts
- Github Packages
- Nuget.org
I use Azure DevOps for my builds, and briefly considered using the artifacts feeds. However, none of my libraries are private. Everything I am writing is a public repository in Github. With that in mind, it seemed that the free offerings from Github and Nuget were more appropriate.
I published the data layer packages to Nuget previously, so I have some experience with that. However, with these platform libraries, while they are public, I do not expect them to be heavily used. For that reason, I decided that publishing the packages to Github Packages made a little more sense. If these platform libraries get to the point where they are heavily used, I can always publish stable packages to Nuget.org.
Container Images
In terms of storage percentage, container images take up the bulk of my Proget storage. Now, I only have 5 container images, but I never clean anything up, so those 5 containers are taking up about 7 GB of data. When I was investigating alternatives, I wanted to make sure I had some way to clean up old pre-release tags and manifests to keep my usage down.
I considered two alternatives:
- Azure Container Registry
- Github Container Registry
An Azure Container Registry instance would cost me about $5 a month and provide me with 10 GB of storage. Github Container Registry provides 500MB of storage and 1GB of Data transfer per month, but that is for private repositories.
As with my Nuget packages, nothing that I have is private. Github packages are free for public packages. Additionally, I found a Github task that will clean up Github the images. As this was one of my “new” requirements, I decided to take a run at Github packages.
Making the switch
With my current setup, the switch was fairly simple. Nuget publishing is controlled by my Azure DevOps service connections, so I created a new service connection for my Github feed. The biggest change was some housekeeping to add appropriate information to the Nuget package itself. This included added the RepositoryUrl property on the .csproj files. This tells Github which repository to associate the package with.
Container registry wasn’t much different, and again, some housekeeping in adding the appropriate labels to the images. From there, a few template changes and the images were in the Github container registry.
Overall, the changes were pretty minimal. I have a few projects left to convert, and once that is done, I can decommission my Proget instance.
Next on the chopping block…
I am in the beginning stages of evaluating Azure Key Vault as a replacement for my Hashicorp Vault instance. Although it comes at a cost, for my usage it is most likely under $3 a month, and getting away from self-hosted secrets management would make me a whole lot happier.