verdaccio is a fork of sinopia and it's backwards compatible.
- I am/was sinopia user and need an easy migration.
- I need a lightweight and free solution 🎉 to host my private packages and no license worries 🎊.
- I need long-term support and help when I got stuck.
- I want a product compatible with the newer tools as Yarn and DevOps (Docker, Ansible, Puppet, etc) tools.
- An evolving plugabble product, not only for Authentification, also for Storage and more in the future.
- An active community 🙋♂️🙋.
- Integration with Nexus, Artifactoy and any other npm compatible registry.
A bunch more of reasons you might be interested.
It appeared that sinopia maintenance had stalled and the author had abandoned it, so there was a suggestion that the sinopia-using community would benefit from a fresh look at the code and the outstanding issues. So here we are 🎉🎉🎉. The last step about the detach from sinopia.
verdaccio aims to be compatible with sinopia along the time preserving the main features, a lightweight app based on local file system and easy installation but being able to be pluggable and built over a modern tool stack.