Live data from Hacker News

Why I've built an alternative to Github

blog.codeplane.com

81–90 of 198 posts

Re: Why I've built an alternative to Github

#81
post #56

Good for you for building this and then charging for it. There certainly is a place in the market for what you are doing and the price you are doing it. Good job.

Thanks! ;)

I too wish you luck!

What about security? If i sign up, is my code safe if I want to keep a repo only for me?

Re: Why I've built an alternative to Github

#82
I think that anyone who complains about GitHub's price has gotten way too spoiled, or perhaps underestimates the amount of effort required to maintain a service of that quality and reliability. I find this to be another symptom of HN tunnel vision.

Re: Why I've built an alternative to Github

#83

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…

I still use SVN for a lot of my own personal projects (don't judge me!) and sure I could setup my own SVN server no problem. But I pay a small fee ($50 a year I think.. or maybe $50/6-mos) for SVN hosting.

Same situation: I want private repo's. Past that, the only other thing I really want is not to have to worry about ANYTHING. It needs to be secure, backed-up, and quick, without me ever having to give it a 2nd thought.

For that, I'm happy to pay this small fee.

Re: Why I've built an alternative to Github

#84
post #82

I think that anyone who complains about GitHub's price has gotten way too spoiled, or perhaps underestimates the amount of effort required to maintain a service of that quality and reliability. I find this to be another symptom of HN tunnel vision.

Nobody says that! I love Github. I used to have a paid account. I still have 100+ repositories in there. I just can't afford Github for my private repositories, which I think it's not for me anymore.

Re: Why I've built an alternative to Github

#85

I just use bitbucket.org + Mercurial. More than enough for personal projects, or more, given that it's unlimited. The only limit is amount of users. Switching to Hg was a bit of work, but I've actually learned to like it more than Git. Really though, it's the same kind of thing and I just use both. So I ended up at bitbucket for the same reasons OP built a new site. My way was quicker though.

I use github for the network effects, but how does hg compare to git, speed-wise? I switched to git from bzr because bzr felt awesomely slow, although git is a real pain to use, even when you're familiar with it.

I understand that bzr and hg are almost identical, command-wise, but hg is about as fast as git, is that correct? What my workflow consists of is diffs/statuses/commits/pushes/pulls in projects with working trees of a few MB at most.

Re: Why I've built an alternative to Github

#86
post #82

I think that anyone who complains about GitHub's price has gotten way too spoiled, or perhaps underestimates the amount of effort required to maintain a service of that quality and reliability. I find this to be another symptom of HN tunnel vision.

It's probably a great price for most dev shops but leaves a gaping hole for companies who have many small projects.

Re: Why I've built an alternative to Github

#87
post #84
post #82

I think that anyone who complains about GitHub's price has gotten way too spoiled, or perhaps underestimates the amount of effort required to maintain a service of that quality and reliability. I find this to be another symptom of HN tunnel vision.

Nobody says that! I love Github. I used to have a paid account. I still have 100+ repositories in there. I just can't afford Github for my private repositories, which I think it's not for me anymore.

If you've got 40 private repos, I assume you're at the very least a moderately experienced professional programmer. Let's say for the sake of a figure that you charge a low price of $50 per hour. So buying a GitHub Gold account is like two hours of extra work per month for you, and you'll probably have to spend more than that on CodePlane (as a user, not developer) because it's simply not as battle-tested and extensive as GitHub. So I don't think it's worth it.

Re: Why I've built an alternative to Github

#89
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…

Would there be a market for gitolite/gitosis hosting? Say, $1/mo for up to 1G of space, backed up, unlimited private/public repos, cli only, rudimentary web viewer for public repos via gitweb.

It's rather easy to set it up (as the comments here suggest), but seems like a lot of folks wouldn't want to go into trouble of learning about it and/or setting it all up properly, or don't have a server to put it on.

Re: Why I've built an alternative to Github

#90
I don't get it, why is setting up a private git repository on your own server a hassle?

Assuming you have ssh access (compacted for clarity):

  ssh server "git init --bare repo/project.git"
  git clone server:repo/project.git
Am I missing something?

EDIT: mkdir superfluous

Post reply on HN