CPAN vs pypiserver

CPAN is a free archive of Perl software and documentation, with ways to find, download, and install modules. Its homepage lists 33,464,960 modules in 47,830 distributions from 14,750 authors; the archive has been online since October 1995. Visitors can search through MetaCPAN or browse modules, authors, and recent uploads. Modules can be installed with CPAN.pm, and manual installation instructions are available. Dependencies can require other modules, a particular version, or a C compiler. The site also provides Perl source archives and instructions for compiling and installing Perl. Authors submit uploads through PAUSE, which inspects, validates, and indexes them before they propagate to CPAN and its mirrors. For existing package namespaces, PAUSE indexes uploads only from the owner or an authorized maintainer. Its documentation says uploaded modules are tested across dozens of architectures by CPAN Testers. The Ports page lists Perl support for over 100 platforms, including Windows, macOS, and Linux. CPAN is backed by a CDN. The FAQ says CPAN handles questions about its own operation, not debugging users’ code.

pypiserver is a minimal, self-hosted package index for uploading and downloading Python packages with tools such as pip and easy_install. It serves packages from regular directories, including wheels, bdists, eggs and PGP signatures, and scans those directories recursively. Packages can be uploaded with pip, setuptools, twine or pypi-uploader, or copied to the server with scp. Upload access can be protected with an Apache htpasswd file; API users can configure custom authentication callables. The maintainers advise password protection for uploads, and the documentation recommends a reverse proxy to provide HTTPS. pypiserver can run as a WSGI application, with documented integrations for Docker, nginx, Apache, gunicorn and Paste. It provides a health endpoint that returns HTTP 200 when the service is running, with an option to configure the endpoint. The current version supports Python 3.10+ and PyPy3. It is free at free and is listed for Linux, macOS, Windows, API and self-hosted use. Its API covers the operations needed by common package tools rather than the full PyPI API; documentation uploads are accepted but not saved to disk.