23 ms·

Bitbucket now rocks Git

726 points by amitparikh 15y ago

dhimes 15y ago
store every line of code you’ve ever wrote in one place without paying a cent Great news (and thanks)! However, please s/wrote/written/ EDIT: I see they fixed the copy.
- jstepka 15y ago
  Thanks for pointing this out.
  - ergosum 15y ago
    Since we have your attention... :) http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/BITBUCKET/Bitbucket+101 http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/BITBUCKET/Bitbucket+... - shows error message "Unable to render {include} The included page could not be found."
    - farkas 15y ago
      Thanks. As I'm sure you've guessed, this was a permissions problem with some of the pages we'd been keeping quiet until the launch. Let us know if you find any more.
mushishi 15y ago
As a daily Bitbucket user, I appreciate their efforts. But unfortunately I don't see improvement on navigation. It's quite painful to browse source code via web. If I just want to quickly look at someone's repository, I will make a lot of browsing, and it's just way too slow. Compare it to Github's slick UI: https://github.com/blog/760-the-tree-slider https://github.com/blog/760-the-tree-slider But I am optimistic Bitbucket will change it for the better.
- brodie 15y ago
  (I'm a Bitbucket developer.) I completely agree that UI's something we need to improve on. I do think we've been making progress: We recently redesigned the commit history page, we've cleaned up the repository and account admin pages, and we've been updating the whole site with a more streamlined look and feel. One of the next big things on our roadmap is redoing the repository header (that thing with all the tabs and buttons). And personally, I'd like to see us standardize on a single repo landing page with everything you need, but that's a little controversial at the moment. :) We're huge fans of defunkt's pjax library, so expect to see it used more on the site in the future - including in the source browser. Oh, and we're currently looking for a designer! http://www.atlassian.com/about/careers/listing.jsp?jobID=143 http://www.atlassian.com/about/careers/listing.jsp?jobID=143
  - sandGorgon 15y ago
    Yes please - small things like the branches drop down are not very intuitive. I think the competitive advantage for Bitbucket will come from super-enhancing features like the issue tracker. Today, I still have to run Redmine inspite of having Github issues. Give me an industrial quality issue tracker (hooks, assignee features, charting, roles and permissions). Basically just pull Bugzilla into Bitbucket. Now, that would be a killer feature !
    - rickette 15y ago
      Really? Bugzilla? Talking about bad user interfaces. Anyway I don't see the BitBucket guys integrating Bugzilla anytime soon since they're part of Atlassian now which markets the Jira issue tracker.
      - sandGorgon 15y ago
        Nope - I'm not really talking about Bugzilla or Jira from a UI point of view, but more of a functionality angle. That's the thing - the UI for issue tracking, on both Github and Bitbucket, is great. No functionality however. TL;DR : will pay for issues
LeafStorm 15y ago
You know, I actually expected that the opposite would happen: GitHub would start offering Mercurial hosting. Because Git isn't what attracts most people to GitHub. It's the sheer fact that GitHub is frickin' HUGE and has lots of people who will show up, fork your project, and send you a pull request. I love Bitbucket, but honestly if GitHub added Mercurial support I would probably move all the way to GitHub because of the size of the community. GitHub is already pretty firmly entrenched in the Git community. I will say, however, that Bitbucket has one primary advantage over GitHub: Unlimited private repositories, with the cost being based on how many collaborators you have. If Bitbucket really promotes this angle, I could see a lot of small development teams moving to Bitbucket, and possibly taking their talent with them. So, if Bitbucket really pushes the "unlimited private repositories" angle, then they could begin taking back market share from GitHub.
- zbowling 15y ago
  They do support HG in a way. See http://hg-git.github.com/ http://hg-git.github.com/
  - gecko 15y ago
    I'll grant that only if you allow me to say that Linux runs Microsoft Office natively due to WINE.
    - zbowling 15y ago
      no. That analogy doesn't fit here. A closer one would be more like Linux supporting FAT32 natively because someone took the time to write proper support for it in an system it wasn't originally designed for (and it works beautifully with almost no corner cases). It may not perform as well but I get to use what I want and still interoperate.
      - eropple 15y ago
        The hg-git abstraction is not very solid. You end up having to "think git" rather than "think hg" and my beef with git isn't in the syntax, it's in git. If I'm going to use hg-git, I might as well use git itself. I don't want to use git; I want to use hg.
sosuke 15y ago
The only reason I went with Bitbucket over Github for my own source control was the availability of free private repositories that Github charges for. Now I've got the best of both source control solutions!
heisenmink 15y ago
This is really good news. The greatest strength they have over Github right now is unlimited private git repositories (github only allows 1 private repo for free accounts), free of charge.
- asb 15y ago
  I'm pretty sure Github don't allow any private repos on free accounts (at least I can't create any).
- calloc 15y ago
  Are you a student? Because that is the only way that I know you can get a free private repo on Github.
rmc 15y ago
Bitbucket (a popular mercurial hosting site) has added git support. Has any popular git hosting site added mercurial support? This shows which DVCS is winning.
- viraptor 15y ago
  Alternatively it shows which group cares about getting things done, rather than some software winning/losing.
- ergo14 15y ago
  It's a power grab, and we benefit from it. There is no need for any DVCS to "win". Now you can use whatever you want without restrictions, why force others to use what you use?
  - farkas 15y ago
    (disclaimer - I'm the CEO of Atlassian) Developers are religious. Whether it is vi vs emacs, or IDEA vs Eclipse or Mac vs Linux. In September we had a huge debate internally (hundreds of comments long) on functional vs non-functional programming. We know that no-one wins in these religious debates. We've found that developers are equally religious regarding their DVCS. Most frequently it is whatever DVCS you started with is the one that you're passionate about. We've found that most companies of any size have both Git and Mercurial lurking somewhere in their development ranks. Previously if they wanted to host their code in the cloud (and who wouldn't), they would have had to choose two different hosting providers. As a developer, this was a pain as you never knew where your code was. Now that Bitbucket supports both, you no longer have to choose. We think this is a huge win! Companies can store all their code in one place. And with the per-user pricing, it is a very fair pricing model (don't have to think about whether a fork is going to cost you or not!).
    - ergo14 15y ago
      Yeah, I'm a happy developer that uses both bitbucket and github - I'd just wish that ui for bb gets nicer and more friendly - and it will be perfect tool for me.
deleted 15y ago
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johnthedebs 15y ago
This is great news, very exciting for people who need a nice place to stash all their private git repos but didn't want to upgrade their GitHub plans for not-that-important projects. Very interesting that they've decided to compete directly too. I wonder if/how GitHub will respond. I strongly prefer their UI and already have a paid plan, but I find myself shuffling repos within the confines of that plan rather than stomaching the (admittedly not very big) upgrade cost since many of the projects aren't super important. I understand why they do it, but I just don't like that they place an arbitrary restriction on the number of private repos.
- masnick 15y ago
  I agree -- I have too many repos I'd like to keep private to host them on github, but would love to if I could. I'm currently paying for a prgmr instance just to run gitolite (https://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite https://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite) so I could have a private place to store remotes for my repos. I'm planning to move to bitbucket immediately.
- Legion 15y ago
  For me and where I work, GitHub's repo restrictions are the one and only cause of us self-hosting a Git server instead of using them. We have around a hundred small, low-traffic repos. Let's put it this way: * on GitHub, thanks to our repo count, we would be a $200/mo Platinum account * on Bitbucket, thanks to our user count, we would be a $0/mo Free account, although we might have to upgrade all the way up to a $10/mo account as we're adding some people. Needless to say, I will be looking hard at Bitbucket now that they're supporting Git.
  - skeletonjelly 15y ago
    > GitHub's repo restrictions You're talking about the number limit?
    - fredoliveira 15y ago
      thanks to our repo count I guess this answers your question. I'm a happy Github customer myself (both personally as well as with my company), but it is interesting to see Bitbucket compete with them head-on. I can see quite a lot of small/medium companies move over.
ollysb 15y ago
Free unlimited private repos for up to 5 users; with competition like that maybe we'll see github improve it's pricing.
- krobertson 15y ago
  I doubt it. There is no need for them to, they aren't hurting or struggling. Running businesses with "lets offer more for free" and "ohh crap, they offer more for free, lets lower our price" is a race to the bottom. It is actually moves like these that make me question Bitbucket more. How viable is the service long term? Do I want to trust all my own code to them?
  - ergo14 15y ago
    You sound like an apple customer, you get more for same price and consider this a bad thing... Pigs indeed fly. It doesn't cost them a lot more in infrastructure to provide alternate dvcs - so your point seems to be completly invalid. More and more I'm starting to think that git is some kind of religion. We benefit from competition between those 2 platforms and in the end this is what should count the most for us - customers.
    - skrebbel 15y ago
      It's amazing that your comment got thumbed down, not up. All points seem perfecly valid, so it really must be the "Apple customer" reference that killed it. Sad.
      - SnowLprd 15y ago
        What's sad is the absurd claim that Apple customers believe that getting more for the same price is a bad thing. As for the next point, whether providing alternative DVCS access leads to greater fixed infrastructure costs or not, that seems like a completely orthogonal point to the "race to the bottom" topic that the OP raised. If all players involved reduce their prices (and therefore top-line revenue) to near zero, it doesn't matter how low the infrastructure costs are -- everyone is still broke in that scenario. So no, not all points here seem valid. Far from it: by my count, it looks like 0 for 2 so far. One point, however, rings true: competition is good for we end-users, and it's certainly exciting that Bitbucket now offers both hg and git access.
yesimahuman 15y ago
I use GitHub mainly for private repos. I think I will actually move my private repos over to Bitbucket. I really like GitHub Issues though. Does Bitbucket have anything similar? I don't see it on their site.
- kingofspain 15y ago
  Bitbucket issues had a recent update (only noticed it today myself) and it's much improved. It's a little basic but it fits my needs pretty well. You can see one at https://bitbucket.org/jespern/django-piston/issues?status=new&status=open https://bitbucket.org/jespern/django-piston/issues?status=ne...
  - elehack 15y ago
    Oh wow, that is an improvement. Their issue UI used to be pretty bad. I'm glad they've improved it so much. Might be time to re-evaluate using it.
tomblomfield 15y ago
I looked at this and thought "this is like Github, but not as good" If you're even semi-serious about development, paying $7/month is nothing for the value they provide.
- ashleyw 15y ago
  Any semi-serious developer is going to use up the 5 private repos really quickly. 20 repos ($22/mo) is easily achievable for anyone who likes side-projects, and after that, larger plans are only "available on request". I wouldn't expect GitHub to compete directly with BitBucket's pricing, but doubling the amount of private repos allowed wouldn't hurt.
  - shazow 15y ago
    Many serious developers opt to keep as much of their source open as they can. It's not uncommon to find dozens of public side projects in the repository list of Github users. Occasionally someone will stumble on something interesting and collaborators will sprout. This is far less common on Bitbucket. Github's pricing policy seems to strongly encourage community and collaboration, and it works wonders.
    - qx24b 15y ago
      It really depends on the type of side projects a developer does. If it has something to do with their main business (say something to manage their server commands easily) or is integrated into another one of their tools the cost open sourcing it may not be worth it.
    - ElliotH 15y ago
      As a student I make regular use of private repos because publishing answers to marked coursework is frowned upon.
      - nirvdrum 15y ago
        This is largely true when you graduate as well. I still have all my grad coursework in git and find it useful to reference, but don't want to make public due to academic dishonesty.
tyler_ball 15y ago
This is great news and I hope it helps do all that others are saying, like improve pricing. I've had a Bitbucket account for a while and never used it, mainly because I'm more comfortable with git. But after poking around Bitbucket and importing some repos I'm seeing that you really get what you pay for. GitHub completely trounces Bitbucket with their ease of use and toolset. I hope Bitbucket can step it up.
amalag 15y ago
I was using unfuddle.com just to get a single private repository (didn't want to pay $10 a month for that on github). This is great news.
- lclarkmichalek 15y ago
  I'm in exactly the same position, and will now proceed to move all private repos over to bitbucket.
Triumvark 15y ago
This has probably been asked before, but is Bitbucket really unlimited? If I encrypt my drive, convert it to ASCII, and upload it, will they host it?
- ergo14 15y ago
  give it a try and tell us, probably no one tried this one yet ;-)
- rcthompson 15y ago
  Good luck committing an image of your hard drive into git or hg. Seriously, though, the limitations of git and mercurial with respect to large files probably prevent them from having to deal with this kind of thing.
  - pclouds 15y ago
    https://github.com/apenwarr/bup https://github.com/apenwarr/bup can help split a big image into many smaller pieces.
  - Triumvark 15y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive
- bhousel 15y ago
  Why upload your drive when you could just mount the dvcs as a drive? https://github.com/mfontani/git-fuse-perl https://github.com/mfontani/git-fuse-perl
- davorak 15y ago
  No it is not considered fair use[1] from the CEO of Atlassian[2]. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3068576 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3068576 [2] Unconfirmed by me. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3067107 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3067107
MatthewPhillips 15y ago
I just checked and none of my existing Bitbucket repos have a Git link, nor can I find a way to add Git support from the Admin screen. However when I go to add a new repo Git is an option. Please tell me (frown face) that this feature isn't just for new repos....
- brodie 15y ago
  When we were prototyping Git support, one of the first things we investigated was having automatic conversion between Hg and Git on the server. We weren't able to get the performance to a level where responsiveness would be acceptable, and maintaining consistency between the two repos was complex. It's something we might revisit in the distant future. As a middle ground, I've been thinking of implementing support for multiple SCMs in a single repository with the conversion/syncing process left up to the user. But that'll probably take more than a couple of 20% days to bang out. :) If you're interested, I have some patches against hg-git that make it easier to take an existing Hg repo and convert it to Git (as opposed to the other way around). I haven't had a chance to prepare them to go upstream yet, but my repo's here: https://bitbucket.org/brodie/hg-git https://bitbucket.org/brodie/hg-git
  - MatthewPhillips 15y ago
    I don't care about converting my code, I'll just delete the .hg directories, I care about having to create new repos MyProject2, MyOtherProject2
- jayp 15y ago
  They have not implemented seamless conversion from hg repos to git repos. However, there exist tools to do that: http://hedonismbot.wordpress.com/2008/10/16/hg-fast-export-convert-mercurial-repositories-to-git-repositories/ http://hedonismbot.wordpress.com/2008/10/16/hg-fast-export-c...
uptown 15y ago
Great news! Wish I'd seen it before I finally took the leap and signed up for a paid GitHub account this morning.
- varikin 15y ago
  I agree. I just signed up for a paid account on Saturday for one project I didn't want public. Time to reassess my options.
drawkbox 15y ago
I love bitbucket for the pricing it turned out to be a more valuable tool for my private repos. Now it is even better with git.
deleted 15y ago
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jaip 15y ago
They announced Git support in 2009 also, but that was an April Fool's joke. Link to that post: http://blog.bitbucket.org/2009/04/01/announcing-git-support/ http://blog.bitbucket.org/2009/04/01/announcing-git-support/
mtogo 15y ago
Blog post by schacon trash talking bitbucket in 3... 2... 1...
kellishaver 15y ago
Definitely going to give this a go. I have a lot of repos I'd like to keep private, but they're mostly personal projects and not worth paying more money for at GitHub. Quick question from someone new to Bitbucket: I have to authenticate every time I push to the repo. I've added my SSH key to the account, but I assume there's some additional configuration, such as how github has you add values for github.user and github.token to your global git config, but I can't find any such info for what those variables need to be for Bitbucket - assuming that's the reason I'm still continually prompted for a password. Has anyone sorted this out yet or got SSH authentication working with Git & Bitbucket?
- petedoyle 15y ago
  Make sure to use git@bitbucket.org:{username}/{reponame} instead of any https links bitbucket might give you. I was able to upload an existing repo I had by: 1) Uploading my SSH Public Key at https://bitbucket.org/account/ https://bitbucket.org/account/ (i.e. the contents of ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub) 2) Create a blank repo at Bitbucket 3) Adding a remote (git remote add bitbucket git@bitbucket.org:{username}/{reponame}.git) 4) Pushing to bitbucket (git push bitbucket master) The most important parts were adding my SSH Public Key, and making sure to use git@bitbucket.org:{username}/{reponame}.git instead of any https links you might see on bitbucket.
  - kellishaver 15y ago
    Ah, thanks so much! That makes perfect sense. I was using the https link that bigbucket provided initially.
  - diramazioni 15y ago
    ack thanks! I wonder why these info are not widely written around the web...
- georgebashi 15y ago
  The github.user and github.token settings aren't used by git, by the way - they're used by any tools you might use that can use the github API. They aren't required for pushing or pulling over ssh.
dewiz 15y ago
perhaps they should update the web site: === Thank you for signing up for Bitbucket! You are currently on the 5 Users plan. You can always upgrade your plan to add more collaborators. We're excited that you're getting started with Mercurial, arguably the best distributed version control system around. We've put together some great resources to get you up and running quickly so that your team can focus on building great software faster. Cheers, The Atlassian Bitbucket team ===
Rotor 15y ago
Great to see bitbucket expanding the offering. A while back I had chosen bitbucket over GitHub because of the free private repository. And Git was not an absolute requirement, non-Git source control was absolutely fine. GitHub still does not offer a private repo for free (currently private is $7/month), I imagine this may change at some point soon now.
deleted 15y ago
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dahlia 15y ago
I really love Bitbucket (over GitHub!), but it seems too late for me.
- aymeric 15y ago
  BitBucket makes it super easy to migrate from GitHub to them.
daemin 15y ago
I still use an installation of Gitosis on my VPS to host my small private git projects. As long as you have a unix-ey box then it's very easy to set it up. Though I would definitely upload public projects to Github, for the community and visibility aspect of it.
flocial 15y ago
While this is great news, I really don't need an interface for sideprojects (yet). Codeplane's been great so far for private repos. I just backed up my Github stuff using Github-backup and added them to Codeplane. Honestly surprised nobody challenged GitHub in pricing until recently. As far as social coding goes they are the Facebook of repo hosting (SourceForge is Friendster and Google Code is MySpace). https://github.com/ddollar/github-backup https://github.com/ddollar/github-backup http://codeplane.com/ http://codeplane.com/
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
zemanel 15y ago
Atlassian (which recently acquired Bitbucket) is well known forJira/Confluence. Could it be that if they might use Bitbucket as an entry point to their products? Perhaps with more integration.
- cmelbye 15y ago
  It seems as if they've already released a fairly simple plugin to integrate Bitbucket with JIRA, which is nice. I'd personally like to see deeper integration between Bitbucket and Atlassian products like Crucible, JIRA, Confluence, etc.
  - sherifmansour 15y ago
    Although I can see the many possible integrations between Crucible, JIRA and BitBucket, I'd love to hear if you have any thoughts on Confluence and BitBucket integration. Right now you can quickly view the contents of a BitBucket repo from a Confluence page: https://plugins.atlassian.com/plugin/details/40188 https://plugins.atlassian.com/plugin/details/40188
dirtyhand 15y ago
Hopefully this is a wakeup call for the Github guys and they start working on their business instead of just the product. This is a great start: http://fi.github.com/ http://fi.github.com/
6ren 15y ago
How is this justified, to stay free? True, it preps users for other Atlassian products; and marginal cost of storage is near-zero these days.
cheald 15y ago
I'm now a BitBucket user. I'll keep using GitHub for my open source stuff, but you betcha that my private repos are going on BitBucket. I'd love to see GitHub step up and compete here, but I'm really perfectly happy to use two products for two different use cases.
- systems 15y ago
  This was exactly what I was thinking Git is the same, moving a Git repo from bitbucket to github shouldn't be an issue bitbucket for your private repos, promote to github for when they become open-source to benefit from the larger community i believe github might end up charging for public repos, rather than reducing the prices for private ones ;)
mark_l_watson 15y ago
I just signed up for a free account and already made 6 private git repos. Nice. I must say that I wish there was a middle road between bitbucket and github pricing: I like to pay enough money to to be fair. I will eventually have about 20 small repos, most of which I won't use very often. Solo developer. It would not cost much at all to support a user such as myself, so if the cost were about $5/month that would be better than free. That said, it is so easy to move git hosting back to one of my EC2s, that if they decide to not provide this service in the future it is only a small hassle.
j45 15y ago
I signed up for Bitbucket the instant they had git availability. I only started using Git regularly for new/small projects a month ago, after quite happily using svn for web projects. Bitbucket gets what I need. I love the social coding of GitHub and will continue to participate in it. But I can't put my own projects there. There's too many small, private repos that I can't keep paying for. Bitbucket's approach is good for me. I'd rather pay for storage/users than per repo. If Github is really about promoting source code control, it shouldn't be a barrier for private / personal projects. For now, bitbucket solves this. I hope Github comes around. Until then, I'm cancelling my $7 github account and giving Bitbucket $10/month even though I'm only using 2 users. They're doing me a real service and favor.

726 points by amitparikh 15y ago

store every line of code you’ve ever wrote in one place without paying a cent Great news (and thanks)! However, please s/wrote/written/ EDIT: I see they fixed the copy.

jstepka 15y ago
Thanks for pointing this out.
- ergosum 15y ago
  Since we have your attention... :) http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/BITBUCKET/Bitbucket+101 http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/BITBUCKET/Bitbucket+... - shows error message "Unable to render {include} The included page could not be found."
  - farkas 15y ago
    Thanks. As I'm sure you've guessed, this was a permissions problem with some of the pages we'd been keeping quiet until the launch. Let us know if you find any more.

mushishi 15y ago

As a daily Bitbucket user, I appreciate their efforts. But unfortunately I don't see improvement on navigation. It's quite painful to browse source code via web. If I just want to quickly look at someone's repository, I will make a lot of browsing, and it's just way too slow. Compare it to Github's slick UI: https://github.com/blog/760-the-tree-slider https://github.com/blog/760-the-tree-slider But I am optimistic Bitbucket will change it for the better.

brodie 15y ago
(I'm a Bitbucket developer.) I completely agree that UI's something we need to improve on. I do think we've been making progress: We recently redesigned the commit history page, we've cleaned up the repository and account admin pages, and we've been updating the whole site with a more streamlined look and feel. One of the next big things on our roadmap is redoing the repository header (that thing with all the tabs and buttons). And personally, I'd like to see us standardize on a single repo landing page with everything you need, but that's a little controversial at the moment. :) We're huge fans of defunkt's pjax library, so expect to see it used more on the site in the future - including in the source browser. Oh, and we're currently looking for a designer! http://www.atlassian.com/about/careers/listing.jsp?jobID=143 http://www.atlassian.com/about/careers/listing.jsp?jobID=143
- sandGorgon 15y ago
  Yes please - small things like the branches drop down are not very intuitive. I think the competitive advantage for Bitbucket will come from super-enhancing features like the issue tracker. Today, I still have to run Redmine inspite of having Github issues. Give me an industrial quality issue tracker (hooks, assignee features, charting, roles and permissions). Basically just pull Bugzilla into Bitbucket. Now, that would be a killer feature !
  - rickette 15y ago
    Really? Bugzilla? Talking about bad user interfaces. Anyway I don't see the BitBucket guys integrating Bugzilla anytime soon since they're part of Atlassian now which markets the Jira issue tracker.
    - sandGorgon 15y ago
      Nope - I'm not really talking about Bugzilla or Jira from a UI point of view, but more of a functionality angle. That's the thing - the UI for issue tracking, on both Github and Bitbucket, is great. No functionality however. TL;DR : will pay for issues

LeafStorm 15y ago

You know, I actually expected that the opposite would happen: GitHub would start offering Mercurial hosting. Because Git isn't what attracts most people to GitHub. It's the sheer fact that GitHub is frickin' HUGE and has lots of people who will show up, fork your project, and send you a pull request. I love Bitbucket, but honestly if GitHub added Mercurial support I would probably move all the way to GitHub because of the size of the community. GitHub is already pretty firmly entrenched in the Git community. I will say, however, that Bitbucket has one primary advantage over GitHub: Unlimited private repositories, with the cost being based on how many collaborators you have. If Bitbucket really promotes this angle, I could see a lot of small development teams moving to Bitbucket, and possibly taking their talent with them. So, if Bitbucket really pushes the "unlimited private repositories" angle, then they could begin taking back market share from GitHub.

zbowling 15y ago
They do support HG in a way. See http://hg-git.github.com/ http://hg-git.github.com/
- gecko 15y ago
  I'll grant that only if you allow me to say that Linux runs Microsoft Office natively due to WINE.
  - zbowling 15y ago
    no. That analogy doesn't fit here. A closer one would be more like Linux supporting FAT32 natively because someone took the time to write proper support for it in an system it wasn't originally designed for (and it works beautifully with almost no corner cases). It may not perform as well but I get to use what I want and still interoperate.
    - eropple 15y ago
      The hg-git abstraction is not very solid. You end up having to "think git" rather than "think hg" and my beef with git isn't in the syntax, it's in git. If I'm going to use hg-git, I might as well use git itself. I don't want to use git; I want to use hg.

sosuke 15y ago

The only reason I went with Bitbucket over Github for my own source control was the availability of free private repositories that Github charges for. Now I've got the best of both source control solutions!

heisenmink 15y ago

This is really good news. The greatest strength they have over Github right now is unlimited private git repositories (github only allows 1 private repo for free accounts), free of charge.

asb 15y ago
I'm pretty sure Github don't allow any private repos on free accounts (at least I can't create any).
calloc 15y ago
Are you a student? Because that is the only way that I know you can get a free private repo on Github.

rmc 15y ago

Bitbucket (a popular mercurial hosting site) has added git support. Has any popular git hosting site added mercurial support? This shows which DVCS is winning.

viraptor 15y ago
Alternatively it shows which group cares about getting things done, rather than some software winning/losing.
ergo14 15y ago
It's a power grab, and we benefit from it. There is no need for any DVCS to "win". Now you can use whatever you want without restrictions, why force others to use what you use?
- farkas 15y ago
  (disclaimer - I'm the CEO of Atlassian) Developers are religious. Whether it is vi vs emacs, or IDEA vs Eclipse or Mac vs Linux. In September we had a huge debate internally (hundreds of comments long) on functional vs non-functional programming. We know that no-one wins in these religious debates. We've found that developers are equally religious regarding their DVCS. Most frequently it is whatever DVCS you started with is the one that you're passionate about. We've found that most companies of any size have both Git and Mercurial lurking somewhere in their development ranks. Previously if they wanted to host their code in the cloud (and who wouldn't), they would have had to choose two different hosting providers. As a developer, this was a pain as you never knew where your code was. Now that Bitbucket supports both, you no longer have to choose. We think this is a huge win! Companies can store all their code in one place. And with the per-user pricing, it is a very fair pricing model (don't have to think about whether a fork is going to cost you or not!).
  - ergo14 15y ago
    Yeah, I'm a happy developer that uses both bitbucket and github - I'd just wish that ui for bb gets nicer and more friendly - and it will be perfect tool for me.

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johnthedebs 15y ago

This is great news, very exciting for people who need a nice place to stash all their private git repos but didn't want to upgrade their GitHub plans for not-that-important projects. Very interesting that they've decided to compete directly too. I wonder if/how GitHub will respond. I strongly prefer their UI and already have a paid plan, but I find myself shuffling repos within the confines of that plan rather than stomaching the (admittedly not very big) upgrade cost since many of the projects aren't super important. I understand why they do it, but I just don't like that they place an arbitrary restriction on the number of private repos.

masnick 15y ago
I agree -- I have too many repos I'd like to keep private to host them on github, but would love to if I could. I'm currently paying for a prgmr instance just to run gitolite (https://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite https://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite) so I could have a private place to store remotes for my repos. I'm planning to move to bitbucket immediately.
Legion 15y ago
For me and where I work, GitHub's repo restrictions are the one and only cause of us self-hosting a Git server instead of using them. We have around a hundred small, low-traffic repos. Let's put it this way: * on GitHub, thanks to our repo count, we would be a $200/mo Platinum account * on Bitbucket, thanks to our user count, we would be a $0/mo Free account, although we might have to upgrade all the way up to a $10/mo account as we're adding some people. Needless to say, I will be looking hard at Bitbucket now that they're supporting Git.
- skeletonjelly 15y ago
  > GitHub's repo restrictions You're talking about the number limit?
  - fredoliveira 15y ago
    thanks to our repo count I guess this answers your question. I'm a happy Github customer myself (both personally as well as with my company), but it is interesting to see Bitbucket compete with them head-on. I can see quite a lot of small/medium companies move over.

ollysb 15y ago

Free unlimited private repos for up to 5 users; with competition like that maybe we'll see github improve it's pricing.

krobertson 15y ago
I doubt it. There is no need for them to, they aren't hurting or struggling. Running businesses with "lets offer more for free" and "ohh crap, they offer more for free, lets lower our price" is a race to the bottom. It is actually moves like these that make me question Bitbucket more. How viable is the service long term? Do I want to trust all my own code to them?
- ergo14 15y ago
  You sound like an apple customer, you get more for same price and consider this a bad thing... Pigs indeed fly. It doesn't cost them a lot more in infrastructure to provide alternate dvcs - so your point seems to be completly invalid. More and more I'm starting to think that git is some kind of religion. We benefit from competition between those 2 platforms and in the end this is what should count the most for us - customers.
  - skrebbel 15y ago
    It's amazing that your comment got thumbed down, not up. All points seem perfecly valid, so it really must be the "Apple customer" reference that killed it. Sad.
    - SnowLprd 15y ago
      What's sad is the absurd claim that Apple customers believe that getting more for the same price is a bad thing. As for the next point, whether providing alternative DVCS access leads to greater fixed infrastructure costs or not, that seems like a completely orthogonal point to the "race to the bottom" topic that the OP raised. If all players involved reduce their prices (and therefore top-line revenue) to near zero, it doesn't matter how low the infrastructure costs are -- everyone is still broke in that scenario. So no, not all points here seem valid. Far from it: by my count, it looks like 0 for 2 so far. One point, however, rings true: competition is good for we end-users, and it's certainly exciting that Bitbucket now offers both hg and git access.

yesimahuman 15y ago

I use GitHub mainly for private repos. I think I will actually move my private repos over to Bitbucket. I really like GitHub Issues though. Does Bitbucket have anything similar? I don't see it on their site.

kingofspain 15y ago
Bitbucket issues had a recent update (only noticed it today myself) and it's much improved. It's a little basic but it fits my needs pretty well. You can see one at https://bitbucket.org/jespern/django-piston/issues?status=new&status=open https://bitbucket.org/jespern/django-piston/issues?status=ne...
- elehack 15y ago
  Oh wow, that is an improvement. Their issue UI used to be pretty bad. I'm glad they've improved it so much. Might be time to re-evaluate using it.

tomblomfield 15y ago

I looked at this and thought "this is like Github, but not as good" If you're even semi-serious about development, paying $7/month is nothing for the value they provide.

ashleyw 15y ago
Any semi-serious developer is going to use up the 5 private repos really quickly. 20 repos ($22/mo) is easily achievable for anyone who likes side-projects, and after that, larger plans are only "available on request". I wouldn't expect GitHub to compete directly with BitBucket's pricing, but doubling the amount of private repos allowed wouldn't hurt.
- shazow 15y ago
  Many serious developers opt to keep as much of their source open as they can. It's not uncommon to find dozens of public side projects in the repository list of Github users. Occasionally someone will stumble on something interesting and collaborators will sprout. This is far less common on Bitbucket. Github's pricing policy seems to strongly encourage community and collaboration, and it works wonders.
  - qx24b 15y ago
    It really depends on the type of side projects a developer does. If it has something to do with their main business (say something to manage their server commands easily) or is integrated into another one of their tools the cost open sourcing it may not be worth it.
  - ElliotH 15y ago
    As a student I make regular use of private repos because publishing answers to marked coursework is frowned upon.
    - nirvdrum 15y ago
      This is largely true when you graduate as well. I still have all my grad coursework in git and find it useful to reference, but don't want to make public due to academic dishonesty.

tyler_ball 15y ago

This is great news and I hope it helps do all that others are saying, like improve pricing. I've had a Bitbucket account for a while and never used it, mainly because I'm more comfortable with git. But after poking around Bitbucket and importing some repos I'm seeing that you really get what you pay for. GitHub completely trounces Bitbucket with their ease of use and toolset. I hope Bitbucket can step it up.

amalag 15y ago

I was using unfuddle.com just to get a single private repository (didn't want to pay $10 a month for that on github). This is great news.

lclarkmichalek 15y ago
I'm in exactly the same position, and will now proceed to move all private repos over to bitbucket.

Triumvark 15y ago

This has probably been asked before, but is Bitbucket really unlimited? If I encrypt my drive, convert it to ASCII, and upload it, will they host it?

ergo14 15y ago
give it a try and tell us, probably no one tried this one yet ;-)
rcthompson 15y ago
Good luck committing an image of your hard drive into git or hg. Seriously, though, the limitations of git and mercurial with respect to large files probably prevent them from having to deal with this kind of thing.
- pclouds 15y ago
  https://github.com/apenwarr/bup https://github.com/apenwarr/bup can help split a big image into many smaller pieces.
- Triumvark 15y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive
bhousel 15y ago
Why upload your drive when you could just mount the dvcs as a drive? https://github.com/mfontani/git-fuse-perl https://github.com/mfontani/git-fuse-perl
davorak 15y ago
No it is not considered fair use[1] from the CEO of Atlassian[2]. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3068576 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3068576 [2] Unconfirmed by me. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3067107 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3067107

MatthewPhillips 15y ago

I just checked and none of my existing Bitbucket repos have a Git link, nor can I find a way to add Git support from the Admin screen. However when I go to add a new repo Git is an option. Please tell me (frown face) that this feature isn't just for new repos....

brodie 15y ago
When we were prototyping Git support, one of the first things we investigated was having automatic conversion between Hg and Git on the server. We weren't able to get the performance to a level where responsiveness would be acceptable, and maintaining consistency between the two repos was complex. It's something we might revisit in the distant future. As a middle ground, I've been thinking of implementing support for multiple SCMs in a single repository with the conversion/syncing process left up to the user. But that'll probably take more than a couple of 20% days to bang out. :) If you're interested, I have some patches against hg-git that make it easier to take an existing Hg repo and convert it to Git (as opposed to the other way around). I haven't had a chance to prepare them to go upstream yet, but my repo's here: https://bitbucket.org/brodie/hg-git https://bitbucket.org/brodie/hg-git
- MatthewPhillips 15y ago
  I don't care about converting my code, I'll just delete the .hg directories, I care about having to create new repos MyProject2, MyOtherProject2
jayp 15y ago
They have not implemented seamless conversion from hg repos to git repos. However, there exist tools to do that: http://hedonismbot.wordpress.com/2008/10/16/hg-fast-export-convert-mercurial-repositories-to-git-repositories/ http://hedonismbot.wordpress.com/2008/10/16/hg-fast-export-c...

uptown 15y ago

Great news! Wish I'd seen it before I finally took the leap and signed up for a paid GitHub account this morning.

varikin 15y ago
I agree. I just signed up for a paid account on Saturday for one project I didn't want public. Time to reassess my options.

drawkbox 15y ago

I love bitbucket for the pricing it turned out to be a more valuable tool for my private repos. Now it is even better with git.

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jaip 15y ago

They announced Git support in 2009 also, but that was an April Fool's joke. Link to that post: http://blog.bitbucket.org/2009/04/01/announcing-git-support/ http://blog.bitbucket.org/2009/04/01/announcing-git-support/

mtogo 15y ago

Blog post by schacon trash talking bitbucket in 3... 2... 1...

kellishaver 15y ago

Definitely going to give this a go. I have a lot of repos I'd like to keep private, but they're mostly personal projects and not worth paying more money for at GitHub. Quick question from someone new to Bitbucket: I have to authenticate every time I push to the repo. I've added my SSH key to the account, but I assume there's some additional configuration, such as how github has you add values for github.user and github.token to your global git config, but I can't find any such info for what those variables need to be for Bitbucket - assuming that's the reason I'm still continually prompted for a password. Has anyone sorted this out yet or got SSH authentication working with Git & Bitbucket?

petedoyle 15y ago
Make sure to use git@bitbucket.org:{username}/{reponame} instead of any https links bitbucket might give you. I was able to upload an existing repo I had by: 1) Uploading my SSH Public Key at https://bitbucket.org/account/ https://bitbucket.org/account/ (i.e. the contents of ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub) 2) Create a blank repo at Bitbucket 3) Adding a remote (git remote add bitbucket git@bitbucket.org:{username}/{reponame}.git) 4) Pushing to bitbucket (git push bitbucket master) The most important parts were adding my SSH Public Key, and making sure to use git@bitbucket.org:{username}/{reponame}.git instead of any https links you might see on bitbucket.
- kellishaver 15y ago
  Ah, thanks so much! That makes perfect sense. I was using the https link that bigbucket provided initially.
- diramazioni 15y ago
  ack thanks! I wonder why these info are not widely written around the web...
georgebashi 15y ago
The github.user and github.token settings aren't used by git, by the way - they're used by any tools you might use that can use the github API. They aren't required for pushing or pulling over ssh.

dewiz 15y ago

perhaps they should update the web site: === Thank you for signing up for Bitbucket! You are currently on the 5 Users plan. You can always upgrade your plan to add more collaborators. We're excited that you're getting started with Mercurial, arguably the best distributed version control system around. We've put together some great resources to get you up and running quickly so that your team can focus on building great software faster. Cheers, The Atlassian Bitbucket team ===

Rotor 15y ago

Great to see bitbucket expanding the offering. A while back I had chosen bitbucket over GitHub because of the free private repository. And Git was not an absolute requirement, non-Git source control was absolutely fine. GitHub still does not offer a private repo for free (currently private is $7/month), I imagine this may change at some point soon now.

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dahlia 15y ago

I really love Bitbucket (over GitHub!), but it seems too late for me.

aymeric 15y ago
BitBucket makes it super easy to migrate from GitHub to them.

daemin 15y ago

I still use an installation of Gitosis on my VPS to host my small private git projects. As long as you have a unix-ey box then it's very easy to set it up. Though I would definitely upload public projects to Github, for the community and visibility aspect of it.

flocial 15y ago

While this is great news, I really don't need an interface for sideprojects (yet). Codeplane's been great so far for private repos. I just backed up my Github stuff using Github-backup and added them to Codeplane. Honestly surprised nobody challenged GitHub in pricing until recently. As far as social coding goes they are the Facebook of repo hosting (SourceForge is Friendster and Google Code is MySpace). https://github.com/ddollar/github-backup https://github.com/ddollar/github-backup http://codeplane.com/ http://codeplane.com/

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zemanel 15y ago

Atlassian (which recently acquired Bitbucket) is well known forJira/Confluence. Could it be that if they might use Bitbucket as an entry point to their products? Perhaps with more integration.

cmelbye 15y ago
It seems as if they've already released a fairly simple plugin to integrate Bitbucket with JIRA, which is nice. I'd personally like to see deeper integration between Bitbucket and Atlassian products like Crucible, JIRA, Confluence, etc.
- sherifmansour 15y ago
  Although I can see the many possible integrations between Crucible, JIRA and BitBucket, I'd love to hear if you have any thoughts on Confluence and BitBucket integration. Right now you can quickly view the contents of a BitBucket repo from a Confluence page: https://plugins.atlassian.com/plugin/details/40188 https://plugins.atlassian.com/plugin/details/40188

dirtyhand 15y ago

Hopefully this is a wakeup call for the Github guys and they start working on their business instead of just the product. This is a great start: http://fi.github.com/ http://fi.github.com/

6ren 15y ago

How is this justified, to stay free? True, it preps users for other Atlassian products; and marginal cost of storage is near-zero these days.

cheald 15y ago

I'm now a BitBucket user. I'll keep using GitHub for my open source stuff, but you betcha that my private repos are going on BitBucket. I'd love to see GitHub step up and compete here, but I'm really perfectly happy to use two products for two different use cases.

systems 15y ago
This was exactly what I was thinking Git is the same, moving a Git repo from bitbucket to github shouldn't be an issue bitbucket for your private repos, promote to github for when they become open-source to benefit from the larger community i believe github might end up charging for public repos, rather than reducing the prices for private ones ;)

mark_l_watson 15y ago

I just signed up for a free account and already made 6 private git repos. Nice. I must say that I wish there was a middle road between bitbucket and github pricing: I like to pay enough money to to be fair. I will eventually have about 20 small repos, most of which I won't use very often. Solo developer. It would not cost much at all to support a user such as myself, so if the cost were about $5/month that would be better than free. That said, it is so easy to move git hosting back to one of my EC2s, that if they decide to not provide this service in the future it is only a small hassle.

j45 15y ago

I signed up for Bitbucket the instant they had git availability. I only started using Git regularly for new/small projects a month ago, after quite happily using svn for web projects. Bitbucket gets what I need. I love the social coding of GitHub and will continue to participate in it. But I can't put my own projects there. There's too many small, private repos that I can't keep paying for. Bitbucket's approach is good for me. I'd rather pay for storage/users than per repo. If Github is really about promoting source code control, it shouldn't be a barrier for private / personal projects. For now, bitbucket solves this. I hope Github comes around. Until then, I'm cancelling my $7 github account and giving Bitbucket $10/month even though I'm only using 2 users. They're doing me a real service and favor.