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Registries concepts

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Registries are collections of ports and their versions. The current catalog of ports in vcpkg are distributed via the registry at https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg. vcpkg lets you create your custom registries, which you can make either public or private, and host them in a variety of storage providers.

There are currently two options to implement your own registries: a Git-based registry or a filesystem-based registry.

Built-in registry

The built-in registry refers to the main vcpkg registry at https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg. Depending on the vcpkg operation mode, this can mean your local clone of the vcpkg repository or the remote repository hosted in GitHub.

Git registries

Git registries are simple Git repositories. They can be shared publicly or privately via normal mechanisms for Git repositories. The vcpkg repository is an example of a Git registry.

Using Git registries offers the best experience for custom registries since you have full control over the versions and contents of your registry.

Filesystem registries

Filesystem registries, as the name implies, live on your filesystem. They are a collection of ports located in a filesystem location and offer a primitive form of version control using a separate path per version.

These type of registries are more suited to be a testing ground for your packages. Or to provide an alternative for registries in version control systems that are not Git.

Next steps

Here are some tasks to try next: