Private Hex packages support

[haljin]

After scouring the code and the examples it seems rebar3 does not have support for private Hex.pm packages. Majority of our code is still Erlang and not Elixir and we would really like to use this feature.

Is that something that is planned or did I miss something and it's possible to use private packages from rebar3?

[ferd]

They are currently not supported.
We need to at the very least get to the newest Hex API first, but I have to say that we have no plans on the table for the private hex repos at this time. I haven't read the doc on how they work.

I've documented the current plans we had in mind at #1777 -- you'll see that private hex repos right now are in the 'nice to have' category, which means that unless it's not that much work to support, we may not expand the effort to do it very early on, although contributions would be welcome. The challenge is getting the project in the right place to even make it there first, though.

[ericmj]

When Hex registry v2 and multi-repo support is added it shouldn't be too much work to support private packages if I understand the rebar plans for multi-repo correctly. For basic support it should only be a matter of adding an authentication key to the repository configuration and using this for the HTTP requests. I would be happy to contribute this.

[ferd]

Is the authentication key an environment thing that should ideally be hidden, or a more public token that can be checked in config files and/or code?

[ericmj]

The authentication key gives read access to the repository so it should be hidden or only checked in to private source control.

[tsloughter]

@haljin if you or someone on your team is interested in helping I think the first step is switching rebar3 to use https://github.com/hexpm/hex_erl for finding and downloading dependencies.

Correct me if I'm wrong there @ferd and @ericmj

[ferd]

That is correct. Also see #1777 for the current roadmap, even if little start has started yet.

[tsloughter]

@haljin support for private packages has been added in 3.7.0-rc1. I'm closing this issue, please open a new one if you have any issues with it.