Sunday, September 30, 2012

Free Private Git Hosting

Today I have spent some time looking for Git hosting for my new pet project. Last time I did such kind of research about three years ago. I was looking for SVN hosting, and I ended up with Unfuddle.
Currently they do not offer a free option any more, and my interests are shifted to Git. My current requirements are very simple:
  • functional free starter option, with no-hassle switch to payed services when needed;
  • both ssh and https access to repository;
  • tracking/wiki option (low priority);
  • private hosting - no requirement to open-source your code like on github;
This is my shortlist:
I had to drop both ProjectLocker and  Springloops because of no https support for Git (only ssh is available). I open accounts on both Assembla and CloudForge. Both of them do not have Trac or any other bugtracking/wiki option for free, but it is not critical on this stage. Registration on Assembla was smooth, in a couple of minutes I committed and pushed a sample project and was able to see it from web ui. Another system (CloudForge) had some glitch during registration: the confirmation email came into my mailbox with about 15-hour delay. During this period the admin module has been annoying me about unfinished registration every time I logged in, asking to provide a confirmation number in a special input field (otherwise my account will be disabled in 24 hours). When email has finally arrived, there was no number, only a registration link to click.
I decided to stay with Assembla for now, but keep an eye on CloudForge in the same time. I like their Publisher option - ability to configure your deployment for Joyent, Amazon WS, Salesforce, Google App Engine, CloudFoundry of custom FTP or SSH option. I had not tried it yet, but from description in sounds useful and time-saving.

Update (next day): I've tried BitBucket this morning, and I think it fits pretty well into all my requirements: free, private, https, wiki/issues tracking, web access, integration with other systems. It allows to get more than one user account to the repository, which also might be useful. I'll stay with BitBucket for now.

4 comments:

  1. If you need a good, free host with an easy way to grow and add services, I suggest Heroku

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  2. Thanks Mark, I know about Heroku and it is cool. For now I really just need a remote storage for sources.
    I am not yet completely convinced about such "free" PaaS solutions. They are still expensive on my mind. Also (if you not careful in your code) there is a chance of misbehaving process eating storage or cpu which puts you down on some money.
    I have a small 24x7 box at home for experiments, and probably would scale to the old-school dedicated server, unless something new in the Clouds would make me reconsider.

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  3. Curious about bitbucket vs. assembla. Is the reason for your preference mainly the issue tracking? I don't have a ton of experience with git but I've been finding assembla pretty serviceable (purely private stuff so far though).

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  4. Thanks for your comment. Yes, it was mostly a matter of preferences I had at that moment. I had to prepare and store some docs and task information, so Trac was a perfect and free tool for the job.

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