Crate Discontinued and Under New Ownership

This is a Post hoc announcement that as of Dec 6th, 2013 I am no longer the owner of the crate.io domain name. It is suggested that everyone linking to or using any of the crate.io subdomains in their deployments revert back to using PyPI proper.

Rationale

In December of 2011 I became so frustrated with the state of PyPI that I decided I could do it better and over a Christmas holiday I laid down the code that eventually became Crate a few months later. Crate did a number of things better than PyPI and a some people in the Python community liked what I was doing and started pointing their deployments or their links towards Crate.

Fast forward to 2014 and I’m now a PyPI administrator and writing a replacement to the legacy code base that currently hosts PyPI. Serving in this role has allowed me to take the things that were good about Crate and bring them to a much wider audience (for comparison, Crate averaged 100-200 hits a day, whereas PyPI gets 90k+ in the web ui alone). Since becoming a PyPI administrator Crate itself started falling into disrepair, there were several errors that were occurring constantly and the code base itself made several deeply ingrained assumptions that turned out to be bad and needed serious refactoring to be fixed.

The broken state and lack of time or motivation to fix Crate and the tiny fraction of traffic compared to PyPI proper lead to me to accept the offer to sell the crate.io domain name and be able to focus fully on PyPI and pip.

Going Forward

The new owners of Crate have pledged to keep the direct link to package pages (such as https://crate.io/packages/pip/) redirecting to PyPI for as long as they are getting traffic [1].

In the near future I will be shutting down the servers that host simple.crate.io, restricted.crate.io, and pypi.crate.io. If you are using any of those in your deployments or locally then I urge you to switch back to PyPI.