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

Re: Why I've built an alternative to Github

#41

Post by arturadib » Mon, Jun 20, 2011, 3:51 PM UTC

I think CodePlane is very cool, but it seems to solve a different problem than the one advertised on the blog.

To save my repos "for posterity" on Github without incurring a $100/month bill, I simply create a master repo (say old-projects/) with all my unused repos in it.

On the other hand CodePlane seems to be a great solution for collaborative work on lots of private repos. This can save big bucks.

I love to see projects like this. I hope it gains some traction and forces Github to change their business model to a more manageable per-GB price.

Re: Why I've built an alternative to Github

#42

Post by brown9-2 » Mon, Jun 20, 2011, 3:52 PM UTC

The title of the page at www.codeplane.com is "Unlimited private Git hosting", yet it appears that you are limited to 2GB of repositories for your $9/month.

How is this unlimited? Are there other plans that you can sign up for? If so they seem impossible to find on the site.

Re: Why I've built an alternative to Github

#43

Post by thorax » Mon, Jun 20, 2011, 3:55 PM UTC

brown9-2 wrote: post #42

The title of the page at www.codeplane.com is "Unlimited private Git hosting", yet it appears that you are limited to 2GB of repositories for your $9/month. How is this unlimited? Are there other plans that you can sign up for? If so they seem impossible to find on the site.

Yeah, it's always hard when people say "unlimited". Here I believe they mean unlimited users and unlimited repositories within the 2GB.

Re: Why I've built an alternative to Github

#44

Post by gvb » Mon, Jun 20, 2011, 3:56 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…

...or gitosis http://scie.nti.st/2007/11/14/hosting-git-repositories-the-e...

Gitosis does not have as fine grained control as gitolite nor is it as well documented (config file errors are hard to debug), but it works well within its limitations. Both are now available as Debian/Ubuntu packages (gitolite was not when I started using gitosis). The other obvious difference is that gitolite is written in Perl and gitosis is written in Python. This should be a superficial difference, but sometimes the world isn't rational.

Re: Why I've built an alternative to Github

#45

Post by sant0sk1 » Mon, Jun 20, 2011, 3:57 PM UTC

arturadib wrote: post #41

I think CodePlane is very cool, but it seems to solve a different problem than the one advertised on the blog. To save my repos "for posterity" on Github without incurring a $100/month bill, I simply create a master repo (say old-projects/) with all my unused repos in it. On the other hand CodePlane seems to be a great solution for collaborative work on lots of private repos. This can save big bucks. I love to see pr…

The one-repo-for-old-projects solution works in some cases, but not really for mine. As a contract developer I often have projects that are under active development for a few months and then go into "maintenance mode". In this case I want separate repos for when maintenance needs to happen. Otherwise that one repo is a mess.

I believe this is the kind of problem that CodePlane solves. And I agree with you that its great to see projects like this present competition and make GitHub better in the long run.

Re: Why I've built an alternative to Github

#46

Post by fnando » Mon, Jun 20, 2011, 3:58 PM UTC

arturadib wrote: post #41

I think CodePlane is very cool, but it seems to solve a different problem than the one advertised on the blog. To save my repos "for posterity" on Github without incurring a $100/month bill, I simply create a master repo (say old-projects/) with all my unused repos in it. On the other hand CodePlane seems to be a great solution for collaborative work on lots of private repos. This can save big bucks. I love to see pr…

I wanted to solve both problems. I have 40+ repos, but about 50% are archives only. So, with 2GB I can store them and I also work on my current projects.

Re: Why I've built an alternative to Github

#47

Post by fnando » Mon, Jun 20, 2011, 3:59 PM UTC

jamesgeck0 wrote: post #32

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.

Yeah, I'm working on it! Just had to do some things first before really working on "selling the product".

Re: Why I've built an alternative to Github

#48

Post by Stuk » Mon, Jun 20, 2011, 4:00 PM UTC

jamesgeck0 wrote: post #32

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.

Yep, before I would even consider paying I want to see the docs for the command line tool, and at least a few screenshots of the web interface!

I does look good from what info is available though.

Re: Why I've built an alternative to Github

#49

Post by micheljansen » Mon, Jun 20, 2011, 4:00 PM UTC

While I do agree that Github leaves space for a model like this, I think the value of Github is that it offers a great community and awesome toolset (online and offline). Then I read this:

"I also wanted to do almost everything from my terminal, so I built a CLI, that you can use to manage repositories, public keys and collaborators. For daily usage, you probably won't have to go to our web interface ever again, and that's awesome!"

And I think "that's what I have with Gitosis on my VPS" (Gitosis uses git to manage user accounts and keys, so it pretty much doesn't get simpler than that). Companies pay for Github for the tools, developers who use CLI are probably not that interested in forking $9 a month for something they already have. Just my two cents, but I wish you the best of luck :)

Re: Why I've built an alternative to Github

#50

Post by patrickod » Mon, Jun 20, 2011, 4:02 PM UTC

Great looking product and very much like your way of thinking in assigning space and not a set number of repos. I'm a github user and have been for a while but such competition would make me reconsider in the future. best of luck with it.