> These may or may not help. Things have certainly changed in the past several years, but if we have learned anything, the "infinite memory of the internet" is anything but. Dependencies vanish and die all the time. So, while you may have a list of dependencies, if you don't have those actual dependencies locally with you, you may be out of luck. Even if the actual project still exists, the older versions you depend on may not.
I say this problem impacts most of the development stacks out there, whenever you're dealing with a package manager:
- Node and Javascript have npm
- Python has pip
- .NET has NuGet
- Java has Maven/Gradle
- PHP has Composer
- Ruby has gem
And all of those have packages that could technically disappear, or you could have network issues and so on (when I build my container images, I sometimes even have apt fail, though very rarely). I think a safe bet is to run your own package proxy, like Sonatype Nexus:
https://www.sonatype.com/products/nexus-repository (there's also JFrog Artifactory in this space, probably others too:
https://jfrog.com/artifactory/)
This can improve build speeds because you refer to your own server for getting packages, the proxy will also pull packages that it doesn't have automatically, there are no rate limits to deal with (e.g. DockerHub pull limits vs the image being pulled once and stored in Nexus, unless changed) and you can also pretty easily see just how much stuff you're relying on.
The next step is to also use this server for publishing your own packages, which is suddenly easier - you can manage your own accounts, with nobody to tell you what you can/can't upload and how: you literally have all of the storage on the server at your disposal, redeploy as often as you want.
The only real downside to this is that you are indeed self-hosting it: you need updates, storage and all that. Well, maybe there's also the issue that using custom repositories downright sucks in some stacks - while npm supports something like --registry, I distinctly recall Ruby being a total pain in this regard in a container context (something about Bundler configuration, since it doesn't seem to support a command line parameter): https://help.sonatype.com/repomanager3/nexus-repository-admi...