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Updates to deno.land/x

Product Update

The goal of deno.land/x has been to provide a central location for third party Deno modules consistent with how Deno operates. We want people to be able to copy and paste source code URLs like https://deno.land/x/oak/mod.ts directly into the browser and be able to view marked up source code and have links to auto-generated documentation.

Today we are releasing a rewrite of the deno.land/x service that solves many long standing issues like rate limits on the GitHub API and providing immutable source code downloads (like on crates.io).

Goals

  • Make source code immutable.
  • Remove the GitHub API rate limits on the website.
  • Remove the need to manually update database.json to add modules.

The way the website currently works is by querying github in the background to receive source code. This worked okay, but we would hit API limits, and the code could change out from under users. The change we settled on would be to keep a copy of any published code ourselves, so we could ensure content availability and integrity.

Changes

We settled on a design where we provide a webhook, which when integrated into your repository, will save an immutable version of any git tagged code.

  • Source code is no longer fetched from raw.githubusercontent.com but rather from our S3 bucket, where we can preserve it forever.
  • Publishing modules works through a Webhook now, rather than by opening a PR on the deno_website2 repository.
  • You can not import from arbitrary commits or branches anymore, only tags / releases. Example: https://deno.land/std@BRANCH will not work anymore, only tagged commits like https://deno.land/std@0.63.0.
  • All files served from the registry are immutable. They can not be changed or removed by the package author.

How does this affect you?

If you only consume modules from deno.land/x you should see very few functional differences. Downloads and navigating through files/folders on the website should be faster, and all modules now display their GitHub star count.

If you are the author of a module, there are a few things you need to do:

  1. Add a GitHub Webhook to your repository. You can find instructions for how to do so on https://deno.land/x by pressing the “Add a module” button.
  2. If you do not have any Git tags in your repository, please create a tag. Only tagged versions are published on deno.land/x.

We will remove all modules that don’t publish a tag within 30 days of adding the webhook.

Future plans

With this new architecture we have the possibility to add all kinds of features. Here are a few that we have planned:

  1. Display download counts for all modules
  2. Give all modules a score based on how well their module is maintained
    • verify that deno lint, deno fmt, deno doc and type checking produce no errors
    • are dependencies pinned to specific version
    • does the module have a LICENCE, README.md
  3. Display dependencies of modules on the site
  4. Serve a JS (type stripped) version of all TypeScript files in a module, to be imported directly from a web browser

If you have any comments or feedback, please open an issue on the deno_registry2 repository or come chat on the Deno Discord.