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PyPI now supports digital attestations

(blog.pypi.org)
218 points miketheman | 1 comments | 14 Nov 24 14:25 UTC | HN request time: 0.244s | source
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belval ◴[14 Nov 24 16:05 UTC] No.42137562[source]▶
I have a bit of uneasiness about how this is heavily pushing GitHub actions as the correct way to publish to PyPI. I had to check PEP740 to make sure it was not directly supported by Microsoft.

> The generation and publication of attestations happens by default, and no changes are necessary for projects that meet all of these conditions: publish from GitHub Actions; via Trusted Publishing; and use the pypa/gh-action-pypi-publish action to publish.

If you then click on "The manual way" it adds a big disclaimer:

> STOP! You probably don't need this section; it exists only to provide some internal details about how attestation generation and uploading work. If you're an ordinary user, it is strongly recommended that you use one of the official workflows described above.

Where the only official workflow is "Use GitHub Actions".

I guess I am an idealist but as a maintainer this falls short of my expectations for the openness of Python and PyPI.

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woodruffw ◴[14 Nov 24 16:12 UTC] No.42137628[source]▶
> Where the only official workflow is "Use GitHub Actions".

The standard behind this (PEP 740) supports anything that can be used with Trusted Publishing[1]. That includes GitLab, Google Cloud, ActiveState, and can include any other OIDC IdP if people make a good case for including it.

It's not tied to Microsoft or GitHub in any particular way. The only reason it emphasizes GitHub Actions is because that's where the overwhelming majority of automatic publishing traffic comes from, and because it follows a similar enablement pattern as Trusted Publishing did (where we did GitHub first, followed by GitLab and other providers).

[1]: https://docs.pypi.org/trusted-publishers/

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silverwind ◴[14 Nov 24 16:15 UTC] No.42137658[source]▶
Why does this need to allowlist CI providers in first place? Why not publish an open interface any CI provider can integrate against?
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1. SethMLarson ◴[14 Nov 24 16:18 UTC] No.42137703[source]▶
Because every CI/ID provider has a different set of claims and behaviors that would constitute a "secure" policy for verification. If there was one singular way to do that then we could, but there isn't yet so PyPI needs to onboard providers piecemeal. The work to add a new provider is not massive, the reason there are not tons of providers isn't because the work is hard but rather because people are voting with their feet so Github and Gitlab make sense as initial providers to support.