Crate index
The crate index is a git repository where metadata about all the crates managed by a registry is stored.
In a way, it is a snapshot of a registry's knowledge of every crates.
The layout of a crate index is specified in Cargo's Alternative Registries RFC.
Alexandrie will create the directories needed to store a crate automatically, so it suffices to only manually create the config.json
file to get going.
The way the crate index is accessed is called a crate index management strategy (a bit of a mouthful, sorry about that 😅).
Strategies will allow Alexandrie to interact with crate indices in a variety of ways, not only locally but potentially remotely (using a litte server on another machine to perform the operation) where the registry itself doesn't have full access to the underlying git repository.