Why I've built an alternative to Github • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I've built an alternative to Github

#31

Post by Revisor » Mon, Jun 20, 2011, 3:37 PM UTC

yakto wrote: post #10

Anyone else happy with Assembla? 2GB, unlimited repos and users, source browser, etc.: http://offers.assembla.com/free-git-hosting/

Assembla is not really a GIT hosting, it's project management with repos. You can use tickets, wiki, internal forum, GIT/Mercurial/SVN repos and some build/deploy tools.

Admittedly some of their tools have small problems, but the team is responsive and improves it steadily.

I've used one of their paid programs for everything we do (must be about two years by now) and I would recommend it.

Assembla doesn't seem to have that social aspect like Github, but I find their combination of tickets, wiki, forum and repos more useful.

Re: Why I've built an alternative to Github

#32

Post by jamesgeck0 » Mon, Jun 20, 2011, 3:38 PM UTC

What does the UI actually look like? Is it just the list of repositories? I'd be more likely to spend money if there was a tour, or an example project I could look at, or an annotated example session with the CLI tool.

Re: Why I've built an alternative to Github

#33

Post by powellc » Mon, Jun 20, 2011, 3:39 PM UTC

While I'd understand this if the complaint was that gitorious is too complicated to setup and host, CodePlane doesn't seem to offer the rich web interface github and gitorious do. In the absence of that, how difficult is it to setup gitolite on a cheap VPS account? I mean, if you primarily use CLI interfaces anyway.

Need redundancy because those fly-by-night VPS providers disappear? Fine, pick up another VPS from lowendbox.com and rsync your git home directory. Done and done.

On a side note, you could consider all your repos on your primary machine your "backup," as with a relatively static IP from a cable or DSL account you can push and pull to your hearts delight from your home box. Not great for collab, but sometimes I feel like the D in DVCS gets forgotten about.

Re: Why I've built an alternative to Github

#34

Post by masnick » Mon, Jun 20, 2011, 3:40 PM UTC

angrycoder wrote: post #16

Maybe I'm not fully understanding this.. If I don't need the web interface and public code sharing, why would I use this verse getting a Linode instance and installing git there.

> If I don't need the web interface and public code sharing, why would I use this verse getting a Linode instance and installing git there.

Private code sharing. You have to install something like gitolite (see my other comment) to do private code sharing with git on a VPS, or you'd have to create a system-level user for every person you want to share code with.

Re: Why I've built an alternative to Github

#35

Post by Zolomon » Mon, Jun 20, 2011, 3:40 PM UTC

http://blog.codeplane.com/

Re: Why I've built an alternative to Github

#36

Post by tuna » Mon, Jun 20, 2011, 3:43 PM UTC

I liked that I dont need to do this setup myself and that I can integrate with S3.

Re: Why I've built an alternative to Github

#37

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jun 20, 2011, 3:46 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Why I've built an alternative to Github

#38

Post by mestudent » Mon, Jun 20, 2011, 3:47 PM UTC

masnick wrote: post #30

You can set something like this up on any VPS with gitolite ( https://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite ) pretty easily. gitolite lets you set up very fine-grained per-user/repo/branch permissions, manage your users' SSH keys, and gives you nice clean git@git.you.com:repo-name access to your remotes. I've done this for myself with a $48/year VPS from prgmr.com specifically because I needed more private repos than Github c…

I do this (also on prgmr) and manage backups with tarsnap+cron which with all my small repos costs nearly nothing even if I don't clean up old tarsnap archives.

Re: Why I've built an alternative to Github

#39

Post by nicpottier » Mon, Jun 20, 2011, 3:48 PM UTC

Github's pricing model really is a painpoint for little consulting shops. We drive next to no traffic and storage on there, but we do a few projects every quarter. Haven't quite outgrown our paid plan yet, but we will in a bit.

Just wish Github would revise their pricing to support peeps like us, I hate to use different interfaces. May choose to just archive things to codeplane until then, keeping things we are actively developing on github.

Re: Why I've built an alternative to Github

#40

Post by Revisor » Mon, Jun 20, 2011, 3:49 PM UTC

barkingcat wrote: post #23

yakto wrote: post #10

Anyone else happy with Assembla? 2GB, unlimited repos and users, source browser, etc.: http://offers.assembla.com/free-git-hosting/

The UI at Assembla is awkward to work with. I participated in a project that used Assembla, and I kept getting a flood of emails attached to tasks and revisions that I didn't want to follow.

You can change the email notifications, BUT:

I couldn't find it for 5 minutes!

A similar thing happened to me a few weeks ago when I was looking for a way to add more repositories to a project. Luckily I got an answer quickly on their support forum (and yes, it was there).

So yes, the UI and information hierarchy is lacking, but ultimately it can do a lot of things.

(For future reference, you can change the settings under Stream - Email Notifications).