Think you don't need a repository manager? Maybe

12 Reasons You Don’t Need Software Artifact Management

By jbaruch August 9, 2018

4 min read

0. You have no code. If you have a project, which has no code, you don’t need to manage any artifacts. Well, you don’t need CI, you don’t need runtime, all you need is a bug tracker. And Kelsey, thank you again for the fun!
1. You have no users. If your software has no users, you really don’t need software artifact management. You don’t have to update, maintain, patch, secure or release anything. Heaven.
2. You work alone. If you are writing an app by yourself and you aren’t using any open source components, then there’s no need to store your binaries in a central system. Of course, you can always share via email or a file server.
3. You don’t believe in code reuse. You’re writing everything from scratch and so you have access to all your source code. No need to import libraries, SDKs, frameworks. You can always copy/paste from StackOverflow anyway.
4. You only care about the latest version. No need to save history. Once it’s updated in production no one will ever ask you to prove what was running at a previous date. You’ve got to keep moving forward!
5. You only use one language and technology per application. Forever. To maximize reuse of your codebase, and to ensure your developers work under the same environment, you want an easy way to share images within your team and across your organization.
6. You don’t need to adapt to new tech. If you have the luxury of being in a long cycle of technology where things change infrequently, there is no need to have rapid releases and therefore you can skip adding a complete continuous update process.
7. You like managing and maintaining your own infrastructure. Some people enjoy keeping the latest open source tools running on all their servers and playing with configuration until it works. Well, it fails sometimes, badly, grinding your entire pipeline to a halt. But that’s OK, no–one in a rush here, right? If you prefer to spend time shaving yaks, you can skip software artifact management completely.
8. You’re never in a hurry to update your software. Some people need to release patches to zero-day vulnerabilities NOW, and that’s one of the things having all the binaries and related metadata lets you do. If you don’t have this issue, it’s just wasteful overhead. Also you might have to wait if one of your external binary repos goes down, but that’s OK.
9. You have no dependencies You don’t have to go through the nightmare of writing your own dependency manager if you don’t use dependencies.
10. Containers are a fad. I promise. Why bother?
11. Your app runs in isolation (neither talks to nor is accessible from a network. This is literally the safest way to run. Just let yourself into the room and update the server that only runs in that room.