Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)?

A marketplace for github repos: https://gitsell.dev

You can even buy the app itself on it. It’s going to be my starter for all other projects too, so I’m adding all the common CRUD app features. Also it aims to be lowest cost possible, which is free for now. I try not to tie it to specific technologies when possible to make it as easy as possible to switch providers in the future.

Just curious why sell read only access?

Suggestion: have a way to buy as a guest and provide an SSH public key to access the repo.

Read-only makes it so a buyer can’t push to main or modify the repo configuration. So to stop someone from paying to “grief” it in the worst case, and just to stop buyers from making changes the owner didn’t sign off on in more typical cases. They can still raise issues and submit PRs, to my knowledge.

But this is for private repo? Because most repos I interact with on GitHub are public and already read only

Thanks for the suggestion. May I ask the intent behind this feature? Is it to preserve privacy or just convenience with your workflow?

Yes it’s intended for private repos. As it stands you could add a public repo but there wouldn’t be much point unless you’re using it as a way to accept donations, though I think GitHub Sponsors is more apt for that. Typically when you add someone to a private repo, they get full write access.

Interesting use case thanks

I don’t have a GitHub account.

I enabled purchases without a GitHub account now where you can log in with just email and download the project after purchase.

I still need to do more reading about how the SSH key approach would work to support it, but hopefully this unblocks you and others.

Thanks for the advice.