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Now's a good opportunity to ask about alternative Git hosts. What other services do HNers use? I've been unwilling to host any personal projects on GH after Co

by davemp 4y ago

Now's a good opportunity to ask about alternative Git hosts. What other services do HNers use? I've been unwilling to host any personal projects on GH after Copilot launched and it because clear that GH/MS doesn't really respect the authors of the code they host. Honestly open source in general has gotten a little less compelling to me after Copilot. The recent security issue at GH has also turned me off even more on Git hosting services. For closed source projects maybe it's just best to store encrypted backups off site and spin up a self hosted option whenever collaboration is needed. Seems pretty inefficient though.

eloisius 4y ago
I’ve been happy with SourceHut
blueflow 4y ago
I have a vps with bare git repos, pushing via ssh. A selection of these has hooks set up to mirror all pushes onto github/gitlab/$platform, but these are write-only.
- davemp 4y ago
  > I have a vps with bare git repos, pushing via ssh. A selection of these has hooks set up to mirror all pushes onto github/gitlab/$platform, but these are write-only. I like it, self-hosting bare git repos has been pretty painless for me in the past on LANs. You could still add a hook to encrypt the repo and backup whenever you merge to dev or something as well. You pretty much only lose the hosted diff/review/ticketing tools which I've never enjoy much regardless.
_0w8t 4y ago
At my previous work almost everything was self-hosted including Git and servers to run machine learning models. The only exception was Jira. The company owned the servers and rented the space in a datacenter. For code reviews we had Critic. At the new work we use BitBucket, but for reviews its UI is strictly worse than Critic. And on top of it it is strictly more expensive than self-hosting experience including paying for a competent sysadmin. I understand that cloud allows to offload a lot of headaches, but I really see no point in using cloud services for development. Even for a small company a dedicated server with another to spare in case of failures will be cheaper and it’s administration will be trivial.
lima 4y ago
My company uses a self-hosted Gerrit instance. A bit of a learning curve, but the code review experience is SO much better than PRs (one commit == one unit of review, clean intra-diffs between different revisions of a patch, stacking of reviews simply by having multiple commits on a branch, UI is very snappy and responsive...). Self-hosting Gerrit is easy[1] because all its internal state is fully transactional, including reviews and configs, and is simply stored as normal Git commits inside the Git repos on the filesystem. In fact, our instance had much better uptime over the past year than GitHub despite being migrated to another server once! [1]: ... unless you need a complex high availability setup or replicas. But 99% of projects are fine with just a single instance and backups.
- skywhopper 4y ago
  Gerrit looks ugly, and the admin story is a nightmare, but it's such a better experience for code reviews (plus you can actually enforce code review in a way Github cannot). I can't stand dealing with Github for code review after spending a few years using Gerrit.
  - codeapprove 4y ago
    (shameless plug alert) If you're looking for a drop-in improvement to GitHub's code review experience, you may be interested in CodeApprove (https://codeapprove.com https://codeapprove.com). It's got a lot of the things that make Gerrit appealing, but with less of a drastic workflow shift (still branch-based PRs) and a much nicer UI.
    - lima 4y ago
      Haven't tried this one but Reviewable and Graphite. They're all very nice and yours looks nice also. The problem with all these third party SaaS-es on top of GitHub: - You have to trust a random (no offense meant!) SaaS company with full access to your repositories, and to not disappear in a year or two. - GitHub API rate limits end up causing issues sooner or later. For instance, Reviewable would randomly break and ask you to add more admin users so it could load balance API requests across multiple accounts! - Likewise, you are still forced into the PR model and things that are trivial in Gerrit, like stacked diffs, are still hard. spr helps[1], but at that point you are piling workarounds on top of workarounds, might as well use a tool that supports the workflow natively... - It gets messy unless 100% of the team is using it because then you have to somehow sync comments and approvals back and forth... And getting 100% of the team to use it isn't much easier than convincing them to use Gerrit, with all of the downsides. [1]: https://github.com/ejoffe/spr https://github.com/ejoffe/spr
lagniappe 4y ago
If you're into self hosting, soft-serve is a really cool CLI based git server from Charmbracelet that is about a half step above a bare git repo over SSH https://github.com/charmbracelet/soft-serve https://github.com/charmbracelet/soft-serve
- davemp 4y ago
  That is pretty slick. Not having to deal with file permissions when limited access to collaborators sounds nice. Can't say I haven't messed that up before.
supriyo-biswas 4y ago
Gitea[1]. It's a self hosted Github alternative, and it's quite lightweight too. [1] https://gitea.io https://gitea.io
- sebazzz 4y ago
  Good API too. With some Powershell magic I added commit checks which get their status from TeamCity (you can also use Gitea actions but that doesn't work on Windows). Then use Renovate and Google OSV scanner as a replacement for Dependabot and Github Advanced Security.
xenophonf 4y ago
I'm migrating from GitHub to CodeCommit. My project has pretty strict security guidelines, and GitHub doesn't have a high enough accreditation. GitHub tries to handwave this by saying good current practice means there's no personally identifiable information, etc. in Git repositories, but I'm not willing to entrust the code behind moderately sensitive infrastructure to a service that thinks they don't need to implement (and more importantly, prove they implement) better security standards and practices. Recent developments have only reinforced my feelings on this matter.
activitypea 4y ago
We still use self-hosted GitLab. It's crazy expensive but we're completely locked in to their CI/CD pipelines plus we still enjoy using it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
couchand 4y ago
I've been very happy with SourceHut (git.sr.ht). It's fast and slick. Does what you need, none of the cruft. Among other things, I really like: I can push to any URL under my username and it creates a repo automatically, and that it reminds me to put a license file on public repos. I really like how the author is open about both the development and the business side.
fHr 4y ago
Gitlab is very good and feels almost the same.

by davemp 4y ago

eloisius 4y ago

I’ve been happy with SourceHut

blueflow 4y ago

I have a vps with bare git repos, pushing via ssh. A selection of these has hooks set up to mirror all pushes onto github/gitlab/$platform, but these are write-only.

davemp 4y ago
> I have a vps with bare git repos, pushing via ssh. A selection of these has hooks set up to mirror all pushes onto github/gitlab/$platform, but these are write-only. I like it, self-hosting bare git repos has been pretty painless for me in the past on LANs. You could still add a hook to encrypt the repo and backup whenever you merge to dev or something as well. You pretty much only lose the hosted diff/review/ticketing tools which I've never enjoy much regardless.

_0w8t 4y ago

At my previous work almost everything was self-hosted including Git and servers to run machine learning models. The only exception was Jira. The company owned the servers and rented the space in a datacenter. For code reviews we had Critic. At the new work we use BitBucket, but for reviews its UI is strictly worse than Critic. And on top of it it is strictly more expensive than self-hosting experience including paying for a competent sysadmin. I understand that cloud allows to offload a lot of headaches, but I really see no point in using cloud services for development. Even for a small company a dedicated server with another to spare in case of failures will be cheaper and it’s administration will be trivial.

lima 4y ago

My company uses a self-hosted Gerrit instance. A bit of a learning curve, but the code review experience is SO much better than PRs (one commit == one unit of review, clean intra-diffs between different revisions of a patch, stacking of reviews simply by having multiple commits on a branch, UI is very snappy and responsive...). Self-hosting Gerrit is easy[1] because all its internal state is fully transactional, including reviews and configs, and is simply stored as normal Git commits inside the Git repos on the filesystem. In fact, our instance had much better uptime over the past year than GitHub despite being migrated to another server once! [1]: ... unless you need a complex high availability setup or replicas. But 99% of projects are fine with just a single instance and backups.

skywhopper 4y ago
Gerrit looks ugly, and the admin story is a nightmare, but it's such a better experience for code reviews (plus you can actually enforce code review in a way Github cannot). I can't stand dealing with Github for code review after spending a few years using Gerrit.
- codeapprove 4y ago
  (shameless plug alert) If you're looking for a drop-in improvement to GitHub's code review experience, you may be interested in CodeApprove (https://codeapprove.com https://codeapprove.com). It's got a lot of the things that make Gerrit appealing, but with less of a drastic workflow shift (still branch-based PRs) and a much nicer UI.
  - lima 4y ago
    Haven't tried this one but Reviewable and Graphite. They're all very nice and yours looks nice also. The problem with all these third party SaaS-es on top of GitHub: - You have to trust a random (no offense meant!) SaaS company with full access to your repositories, and to not disappear in a year or two. - GitHub API rate limits end up causing issues sooner or later. For instance, Reviewable would randomly break and ask you to add more admin users so it could load balance API requests across multiple accounts! - Likewise, you are still forced into the PR model and things that are trivial in Gerrit, like stacked diffs, are still hard. spr helps[1], but at that point you are piling workarounds on top of workarounds, might as well use a tool that supports the workflow natively... - It gets messy unless 100% of the team is using it because then you have to somehow sync comments and approvals back and forth... And getting 100% of the team to use it isn't much easier than convincing them to use Gerrit, with all of the downsides. [1]: https://github.com/ejoffe/spr https://github.com/ejoffe/spr

lagniappe 4y ago

If you're into self hosting, soft-serve is a really cool CLI based git server from Charmbracelet that is about a half step above a bare git repo over SSH https://github.com/charmbracelet/soft-serve https://github.com/charmbracelet/soft-serve

davemp 4y ago
That is pretty slick. Not having to deal with file permissions when limited access to collaborators sounds nice. Can't say I haven't messed that up before.

supriyo-biswas 4y ago

Gitea[1]. It's a self hosted Github alternative, and it's quite lightweight too. [1] https://gitea.io https://gitea.io

sebazzz 4y ago
Good API too. With some Powershell magic I added commit checks which get their status from TeamCity (you can also use Gitea actions but that doesn't work on Windows). Then use Renovate and Google OSV scanner as a replacement for Dependabot and Github Advanced Security.

xenophonf 4y ago

I'm migrating from GitHub to CodeCommit. My project has pretty strict security guidelines, and GitHub doesn't have a high enough accreditation. GitHub tries to handwave this by saying good current practice means there's no personally identifiable information, etc. in Git repositories, but I'm not willing to entrust the code behind moderately sensitive infrastructure to a service that thinks they don't need to implement (and more importantly, prove they implement) better security standards and practices. Recent developments have only reinforced my feelings on this matter.

activitypea 4y ago

We still use self-hosted GitLab. It's crazy expensive but we're completely locked in to their CI/CD pipelines plus we still enjoy using it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

couchand 4y ago

I've been very happy with SourceHut (git.sr.ht). It's fast and slick. Does what you need, none of the cruft. Among other things, I really like: I can push to any URL under my username and it creates a repo automatically, and that it reminds me to put a license file on public repos. I really like how the author is open about both the development and the business side.

fHr 4y ago

Gitlab is very good and feels almost the same.