aptly is the best thing to happen to debian repository management since sliced bread.

Plenty of apps are not good enough in repo management land - they are often badly documented and difficult to set up. Repositories need to be simple and straightforward - they are a often a critical but lightweight component in a much larger infrastructure.

I wanted something that installed quickly and easily. aptly was most of the way there with an available package and some very good documentation.

Want to spin it up on a box without having to fuss with gpg and trawl the API docs?

Use this role availble on ansible-galaxy and you’ll be setup within in minutes. A suite of tests use simple curl requests to add packages to the repo, list existing packages and remove individual files to demonstrate the shiny new API.

It’s open source. Thank Andrey Smirnov for his excellent work.