7 ms·

Bitbucket passes one million users

447 points by Lightning 13y ago

hugi 13y ago
Bitbucket is great. I use it for all my private projects since it offers a much more sensible price structure than github (for me at least — github's model is based on number of repositories while bitbucket's is based on number of users).
RexM 13y ago
I recently stopped paying $12/month for github and moved all my private repositories to bitbucket. Since it's just me working on the repositories, it's totally free.
- RivieraKid 13y ago
  Me too. Public repos github, private bitbucket.
  - kleiba 13y ago
    Honest question: why do you need a central repository (SVN style) if it's a private repo? I tend to develop my own projects mostly on two different machines, and the core code management and synchronization doesn't need anything but git itself. Is it so you can use bug trackers etc?
    - pbreit 13y ago
      Hmmm..how does synchronization work without a server or direct connection?
      - cmelbye 13y ago
        There's obviously a direct connection between the machines. Synchronization works exactly as it does when you synchronize with GitHub. It's just SSH.
        pbreit 13y ago
        I don't think it's that obvious. Could be sneakernet, dropbox, etc. Is setting up a lasting direct connect easy?
        gohrt 13y ago
        You shouldn't be downvoted. It's not obvious how to use git to communicate between two client-configured machines. If one of them has a public domain name or IP, or they are both on the same LAN (likely when one is a laptop and they are owned by the same person), then it's simple to communicate via git. But, it wouldn't be so easy for, as an example, you and I to share code between our laptops in different time zones, unless we used a stable server somewhere.
    - mathrawka 13y ago
      Offsite data backup of the entire repository for free.
      - mkehrt 13y ago
        This is the truth.
      - amalag 13y ago
        I use bitbucket for this and also have it on s3 via Jgit
      - kleiba 13y ago
        I see. I suppose that makes sense if you mostly work on a single machine. (Since I usually oscillate between two machines I never think about backing up in addition to the normal work-flow.)
        OGC 13y ago
        You should think about that in case your house burns down.
        kleiba 13y ago
        Frankly, I think that's exactly what I'm never worried about - especially not for my personal projects.
        uniclaude 13y ago
        Even if you work on several machines, having not to worry about whether they are turned on / are accessible from wherever you are is a huge plus. People tend to have laptops nowadays, which you don't necessarily think about as always on computers.
        kleiba 13y ago
        Well, mine is always on. :-)
        13y ago
    - Osiris 13y ago
      I use Bitbucket with private repos for my code and websites. It makes it easier for me to use any of my computers or laptops to work on the same code and it also makes it easier to deploy to my webserver. When I want to deploy, I just do a git pull on the master branch. Easier than uploading files with SSH and it makes it a lot easier to rollback the server if needed.
    - acjohnson55 13y ago
      For me this comes up working on collaborative projects with multiple people
    - patrickg 13y ago
      For me it's easy to deploy the code onto a server which runs the code. I am not the only administrator, but the only software developer. I want the other admins to be able to pull code from that repository (bitbucket offers "read only ssh keys")
    - Lazare 13y ago
      Why not set up a private bitbucket repo, and just always push your code to bitbucket when you're done working, and pull when you start? It's a free offsite backup, and if you ever need to add another machine (or developer) to the project, your code is already sitting there on bitbucket. And you never need to worry about firewalls, NAT, one of the machines being off, whatever, because bitbucket is (almost) always up and accessible. And if you forget to push after working, or if bitbucket is down, you can still fall back to your existing workflow. In addition, if you're doing anything web based, sooner or later you'll need to deploy to a sever out on the internets. Being able to pull from bitbucket makes deployment really easy, again without tinkering with firewall ports or anything. It's not so much a question of "need" it's "why not do this thing which has some benefits, and no real downside?"
- latj 13y ago
  I really like bitbucket. The other day I actually looked at their pricing plans to see if their was a small plan I could upgrade to for additional features. I cant really even think of new features I need; And, the size of the free plan is good enough for me. I just really like the service. Weird.
- grandalf 13y ago
  I think Github unnecessarily is having a LOT of its lunch eaten by Bitbucket b/c of its unwillingness to let people just have a bunch of small private repos for low activity work.
sshconnection 13y ago
Glad to see Bitbucket doing so well. Their support is great, bailed us out of a nasty mess we got tangled up in our repo.
ckdarby 13y ago
The people in the comment are the first ACTUAL people I've met that use bitbucket >_>
- rbehrends 13y ago
  Tool usage patterns often exhibit social clustering. I.e., friends and colleagues tend to use similar tools, through a mixture of exposure, recommendation, similar work habits, shared constraints, etc. When the tool in question is about interacting with others (whether socially or professionally), it's naturally even more pronounced.
- phaer 13y ago
  I found it pretty popular in parts of the python community. And I guess it's used for a lot of private repositories.
  - KPLauritzen 13y ago
    exactly, private repos. When you are talking about some OSS project it is often on github, but the authors might still have their private stuff on bitbucket. And there would be no reason to mention it.
akurilin 13y ago
Bitbucket is awesome, we're big fans.
pan69 13y ago
Recently starting using Bitbucket and I really like it. I find the team thing a bit difficult to understand and not very intuitive but it could be just me. I vaguely remember them also having SVN support but that seems to be no longer there. I guess I have re-import all my old repos using Git now.
- isxek 13y ago
  As far as I can remember, they started with providing Mercurial support, not SVN. Perhaps you were thinking of Google Code (they had SVN support, then Hg, then Git)?
hoka 13y ago
Congrats! Before GitHub had free private academic repos, I used Bitbucket and was really pleased. I'm out of school now, and I think I'll continue to use Bitbucket for private stuff. Great product!
- IanChiles 13y ago
  Bitbucket offers unlimited collaborators on your repos if you have an education email
speeder 13y ago
Kidoteca uses Bitbucket, because for us our GIT serving is free :) Also I use their SourceTree GUI GIT tool, it is really nice too. Now this is looking like a ad for Atlassian, I should charge them :P
- Osiris 13y ago
  SourceTree is great and it has both a Mac and Windows version which makes it easy for me to switch between my Mac and other PCs around the house.
  - dminor 13y ago
    Easily the best git GUI on Windows that I've tried.
    - durzagott 13y ago
      I find SourceTree to be very slow and heavy. If I need to use a GUI then I find the built-in Gitk and GitGui more than adequate. They're not pretty, of course, but they do the job just fine.
  - NicholasMurray 13y ago
    Yeah, SourceTree is easy to use and the latest release looks great. Although GitHub for Windows got me started with git, I much prefer SourceTree when I need a GUI (as a git nube).
imperialWicket 13y ago
Github has the social aspects nailed down, but for small teams or personal projects, I don't hesitate to use bitbucket. Particularly now that you can use HipChat for free on small teams, hosting with bitbucket and managing your project exclusively through Atlassian is fantastic. I like issue management in bitbucket much more than github, as well (personal opinion, no great foundation here).
- tshepang 13y ago
  What does "social aspects" mean? Number of users and/or something else?
  - jpreiland 13y ago
    I would imagine the ease of sharing, searching, following, comments/discussion, pull requests, etc. I don't have any experience with Bitbucket yet other than making an account and poking around with the interface, so I don't really have a frame of reference, but GitHub does seem to do the above things quite well in my relatively limited experience.
  - imperialWicket 13y ago
    GitHub definitely has more users (4.4m claimed https://github.com/features/community https://github.com/features/community), but I meant the social interaction capabilities and features that GitHub offers. GitHub is much more organized around community and public feedback (search, stars, comments, etc.), than BitBucket. IMO, neither is claiming to be something they aren't. It just happens that for private repos and hosting where the focus isn't discoverability or community-driven, BitBucket seems like an easy choice. However, if you want to integrate with communities or popular open source groups/code - GitHub is probably a better option. They're both great overlays for Git, it's just important to keep in mind where their core focus is. For GitHub, community is clearly a front-runner. BitBucket is more focused on private repo options and process management/tools. I put some sweeping claims in this comment, but there's a lot of really good data in this post to supplement.
    - 13y ago
riddim 13y ago
Bitbucket is an especially awesome resource for students. (Yes, I know GitHub offers free student accounts.) But the unlimited free private repositories makes it easy to back up tons of homework projects (as opposed to the small GitHub offering), without worrying about clogging your quota, or having your work available to the public.
- rz2k 13y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if this has a lot to do with the latest growth. I've taken one or two Coursera courses (eg. [1]) where Bitbucket was specifically recommended for the private repositories. It would be a hassle to get counted as a student by Github without an edu email, and it would be too much for them to individually approve tens of thousands of people. [1] http://www.coursera.org/course/scicomp http://www.coursera.org/course/scicomp
  - mcintyre1994 13y ago
    I know Bitbucket maintain a list of student Emails, I imagine Github do the same. They send a confirmation Email, you confirm, you get upgraded - all automatic. No reason to manually approve that. Bitbucket give students unlimited collaborators, but you probably don't need that for Coursera courses anyway.
    - rz2k 13y ago
      Bitbucket has a free tier for unlimited private repositories with 5 or fewer collaborators. Though you sign up with an email address, there is nothing about it being with "your school-issued email", because there is no stipulation about the tier being for students. Github will approve people for using a student email address even if their school doesn't give them an email account, but it happens on a case by case basis, with requirements such as requesting that you forward a scanned copy of your student ID. The difference is that Bitbucket does not ask you to be a student for the free account, so there is no process to prove that you are a student. Github has many advantages, but hassle-free, free private repositories is not one of them. What I was saying is that with the increase in students who are encouraged to use remote version control who may not have a student email account, or even a student ID, has likely contributed to the increase in users on Bitbucket. It is worth noting that some of these courses have more than 100,000 people sign up. Even if only a small fraction finish the courses, a small fraction use version control, and many are smaller, there have already been dozens of these courses conducted in the last year on Coursera, Udacity, and EdX.
ereckers 13y ago
I've been using them for a few years now. Free repos got me there. Assembla makes use of it as well, and I've run it through that on a project. I don't do enough open source stuff unfortunately to find myself at Github, but for maintaining a bunch of free private repos its great.
- blktiger 13y ago
  Assembla is it's own company and is not associated with Atlassian as far as I know.
- oBeLx 13y ago
  Assembla is an independent company: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembla http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembla
  - ereckers 13y ago
    Thanks for the correction. I made the edit above. Funny thing is that I had a feeling I was wrong, but general sloppiness convinced me adding a question mark to my statement was better then taking 10 seconds to actually look it up.
dimascyriaco 13y ago
I use Bitbucket at work. And it stinks compared to Github.
- imperialWicket 13y ago
  I use both regularly, and while I definitely see areas that I like/dislike in each, I don't really see it as so one-sided. Care to elaborate on exactly what aspects cause such a dramatic swing for you?
- heurist 13y ago
  I have used both for a couple of years and the biggest difference I have noticed is that github has an open, social design while on bitbucket you feel like the only person on the site.
- rrrhys 13y ago
  I don't particularly see the difference and switch between both pretty much daily - granted I don't take advantage of Github social features really.
  - fletchowns 13y ago
    If you don't take advantage of the Github social features, which is essentially what Github is all about, I don't think your opinion on the matter is worth sharing with everybody, no offense intended.
    - kibibu 13y ago
      Which social features would you say are missing, bearing in mind that Bitbucket has teams, issue tracking, wikis, pull requests and code review features?
      - fletchowns 13y ago
        My comment didn't have anything to do with any features that Bitbucket may or may not be missing, so I'm not sure why you are asking me that?
tn13 13y ago
I have been using Bitbucket for all my private projects. I think both BitBucket and Github can prosper together.
- rsync 13y ago
  You can improve this algorithm a bit by adding the string "compliments of the day to you!" to the output...
n9com 13y ago
We saved hundreds of dollars a month moving over to BitBucket last year.
fareesh 13y ago
Bitbucket is great. Glad to see them doing well.
sergiotapia 13y ago
If you're wondering how they can offer free private repositories (awesome!), it's probably because they also offer a ton of other tightly integrated services such as Crucible, JIRA, etc. JIRA is pretty sweet to keep things in order.
- vyrotek 13y ago
  JIRA is pretty sweet to keep things in order. Really? I use and love BitBucket, but the last 2 places I worked at used JIRA and it was the worst project management tool I've ever used. I'm sure someone will say they didn't configure it right or educate the devs or something. Seriously though, it was pushed down from upper management in both cases and it was a terrible experience. Then they thought Greenhopper would fix it, ha. (This was about 4+ years ago) Edit - According to the comments below it sounds like my experience was a result of trying to do too much with it. I just might play around with a bit just for some bug tracking with some of my BitBucket projects.
  - Ingaz 13y ago
    In my experience it does not matter which tool is in hands of people who like to "tweak", "twist", "improve", etc. I've seen trac with "features", now I see JIRA with "features". JIRA itself is not bad as issue tracker. (Trac also is not bad)
    - fusiongyro 13y ago
      I think the core concept of Trac is great: automatic linking between issues, wiki pages and revisions. I think it suffers from being slow and difficult to install and configure, as well as using a very uncommon rendering engine that has really stymied theming. I use JIRA at work, and honestly it's completely fine. It's a goddamn bug tracker. If I can make bugs and close them it's doing its job. Nobody in my organization reads email or tracks their stuff anyway. Sometimes what you have are organizational/management problems, and no amount of wizzy technology is going to fix that.
  - ripter 13y ago
wooptoo 13y ago
Mercurial is a better tool than Git in almost every aspect. It's easy to learn and gets out of your way. I chose it over git a few years ago and sticked with it ever since and used Bitbucket to host most of my stuff. You don't get the community that Github has, but the hosting is great.
- VMG 13y ago
  > Mercurial is a better tool than Git in almost every aspect. No need to proclaim personal tastes as absolute truths around here. In any case, Bitbucket has complete git support.
  - drsintoma 13y ago
    > No need to proclaim personal tastes as absolute truths around here. In all fairness, we all do that a lot.
  - ngoldbaum 13y ago
    Right, but github only allows, well, git repositories. If they added hg support I'd have a strong reason to think about putting repositories on my github account.
    - yawaramin 13y ago
      Adding hg support would be kinda awkward given their name.
- seany 13y ago
  I totally agree. Its one of those tools that stays out of your way unless you `need` to do something weird (unfortunately when you need to do that some times it can get really wierd). I feel like with git the base line is fairly complicated.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  I feel like I am taking crazy pills whenever somebody says that mercurial is simpler than git. Mercurial's per-file revlog and structured .hg/store/data is way weirder / more complex than git's SHA-addressed DAG with minimal/orthogonal object types. The only real blemish on git is that lightweight tags should not exist.
RVijay007 13y ago
Love bitbucket - use it exclusively for private projects and small group shared projects. If you sign up with a .edu account, you get free lifetime unlimited collaboration, which is awesome.
orangethirty 13y ago
Has bitbucket had any security issues like github has had in the past?
- jespern 13y ago
  We've never had a breach.
  - kelnos 13y ago
    ... that you know of. I think the parent was asking a broader question, even including security issues that were brought up and fixed without being exploited.
- rogerbinns 13y ago
  They had one I reported Oct 2010, took a while to convince was an issue and they finally fixed a few months after saying they would. The URLS for attachments to private issues in private repos were guessable and publicly accessible if you guessed right (ie no authentication for them). The URLs were like this https://bitbucket-assetroot.s3.amazonaws.com/<username>/<reponame>/<date>/<ticketnumber>/attachmentname https://bitbucket-assetroot.s3.amazonaws.com/<username&#... Obviously a bit tedious to guess for humans, but no big deal for computers.
  - orangethirty 13y ago
    Do you put this issue in the same level as the ones github has had?
    - rogerbinns 13y ago
      Issues always happen. It is how they are handled that makes the difference. I've not paid close attention to Github but it appears they react responsibly and quickly. With my issue it seemed like Bitbucket was a one man shop and I suspect that if I had thrown a fit things would have happened quickly. Jesper was attending pycon and I was fine with addressing it after that, but then it was not promptly attended to afterwards. I have no records of how long it took to fix but it was at least several weeks and may have been months. He did dispute "easily guessable". (The Bitbucket service at the time was also overwhelmed with languishing tickets.) In my own view, private data being accessible no matter how improbable is always an immediate issue. Issues that initially seem improbable get turned into the probable very quickly by the bad guys who are far more imaginative. But as I said this was late in 2010. I have no idea if the culture of Bitbucket has changed since then or is better.
hkmurakami 13y ago
It's awesome to have alternatives (especially those that offer a distinct value proposition compared to its competitors) and it' great to see them growing! :)
joeld42 13y ago
Bitbucket is great for small teams and individual work. Thanks for existing.
SEJeff 13y ago
I wonder how many users GitHub has.
- reledi 13y ago
  They have at least 3.5 million users [1]. They reached 1 million users in 2011 [2]. I wonder how many users are active on BB and GH though. In my case, I have an account for both but never use BB. [1] https://github.com/about/press https://github.com/about/press [2] https://github.com/blog/952-1-million-user-party-mon-oct-17-in-sf https://github.com/blog/952-1-million-user-party-mon-oct-17-...
spicer-matthews 13y ago
We use Bitbucket at Cloudmanic Labs we are pretty happy with it. GitHub almost has too many bells and whistles. We do use Github for public stuff as that is what everyone uses.
ellicottvilleny 13y ago
I love bitbucket but I would like to be able to create clusters of related BitBucket projects, by language, tool, etc. Right now there isn't even a search feature, let alone any browse capability.
- jstepka 13y ago
  Labels, repo groupings or something similar is on our mind too. No promises on the release date but it's something we've been thinking about. Justen - Bitbucket product manager
pbreit 13y ago
Bitbucket is nice as a Mercurial or Git repo service but Gihub is a phenomenon.
- joeblau 13y ago
  Yeah, but they don't offer free private repos. The only reason I use GitHub now is to host my open source projects. My company and personal stuff is on BitBucket.
jbarham 13y ago
It's worth noting that GitHub charges per repo whereas Bitbucket charges per user. So GitHub might make sense for product businesses where there are only a handful of repos, but Bitbucket is much more cost effective in an agency environment where you might have a repo per client or even per project.
gldnspud 13y ago
An interesting difference I've noticed about Bitbucket vs Github: While Github has had a "deploy key" feature for quite a while, and Bitbucket only added such a feature just under a year ago, I think Bitbucket's version is a much better fit for what deploy keys are usually used for. With Github, a deploy key has read-write access to repos, and each key can only be attached to a single repo. However, with Bitbucket, a deploy key has read-only access to repos, and each key can be attached to more than one repo.
ptolts 13y ago
Wish the contest was open to Canadians! I use Bitbucket, and its been great to me.
drawkbox 13y ago
I love bitbucket and even paid $10 before I had users for personal projects, now I pay since I have so many biz and client repos up there and growing teams. I have been recommending it for private repos/companies ever since and have gladly paid for it. You can store so much up there and unlimited repos in either Mercurial or Git which is awesome. For company/private repos I always use bitbucket, for OSS I use github. The prices are right, it's flexible and you can have the comfort of serviced repos off your local. It is great for remote teams or getting companies to open up to remote access to repos. I started using bitbucket when it was primarily python focused (github started ruby focused) and liked Mercurial since it was Python based and better supported on Windows back in the day for many windows clients. But they have definitely kept up and after Atlassian bought it they haven't dropped the ball. I also use SourceTree before they bought it and Atlassian knows good tools when they see them, bought that and opened it up (with a windows client in beta). Congrats to bitbucket from a happy customer for a long time.
- hhandoko 13y ago
  I completely agree. I picked BitBucket initially because Mercurial was better supported in Windows. I was even happier when they ported SourceTree to Windows. All I need now is the Mercurial support for it, so I can finally use a single client for both Git + Hg in Windows.
mhartl 13y ago
I've increasingly found myself using both GitHub and Bitbucket. In this vein, I just pushed up some changes to my list of Git utilities (https://github.com/mhartl/git-utils https://github.com/mhartl/git-utils) that includes full pull request support for both GitHub and Bitbucket on OS X. In particular, if you're on branch foobar and want to issue a pull request to merge with master, you just type $ git pull-request This pushes your local branch up to origin and opens the pull request page at GitHub or Bitbucket (depending on the relevant URL from .git/config). The same Git utils repo includes git open, which opens the remote page for your project: $ git open As with git pull-request, it works with both GitHub and Bitbucket (OS X only).
ausjke 13y ago
I have been using bitbucket for a few projects, awesome and thanks!
joering2 13y ago
Bitbucket is great but their Atlassian SourceTree software cannot be use anymore. It used to be fine couple versions ago, now the newest update does not even let you run it. I had to re-install couple times and nothing; only removing registries help. Also, some features are being taken away for no reason (like ability to remember to which branch you pushing, etc you have to re-check those again and again at each push).
- snowpalmer 13y ago
  I haven't experienced this problem.
dracoli 13y ago
Congrats to bitbucket. Love it cause of the free private repos. However whenever I see bitbucket I remember this spooning video made by them http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYBjVTMUQY0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYBjVTMUQY0
yawaramin 13y ago
I've been a Bitbucket member since 2009 and have an open source project (since 2010) as well as a few private repos. I've had users signing up simply to open issues and communicate with me. Works like a charm. They've always been top-notch but with git support and Atlassian's rising profile in the git community they're really starting to gain traction. I hope they keep up the good work.
AbhishekBiswal 13y ago
Just because of its free private repositories hosting plan. I am pretty sure there are more private repos on bitbucket than public repositories. And we already know where people go to host their public repositories.
dodo4711 13y ago
Bitbucket should add static web-hosting (aka User/Organization/Project pages). That would be a killer!
- shuzchen 13y ago
  See http://pages.bitbucket.org/ http://pages.bitbucket.org/ and https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/BITBUCKET/Publishing+a+Website+on+Bitbucket https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/BITBUCKET/Publishin...
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
vetler 13y ago
Congratulations, jespern!
reidrac 13y ago
Congratulations! One thing I miss in Bitbucket is repo discovery. There's no way, or at least I can't find it, to browse the repositories filtering by language, popularity, etc. 1 million users, I don't know how many repos, but I can tell you I've found lots of cool projects in GitHub thanks to to their search/browsing features. I may be wrong but I think Bitbucket needs that. (there's a bug report: https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issue/2934/browse-repositories-by-language-bb-39 https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issue/2934/browse-reposito...)
- ngoldbaum 13y ago
  There are a number of issues that I'd like to see bitbucket push on. [1], [2], [3], [4] to name a few. If they want to compete with github on features as well as pricing for private repos, they really need to address these things. [1] https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issue/2184/support-cnames-for-repositories-bb-3655 https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issue/2184/support-cnames-... [2] https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issue/6024/ability-to-ignore-whitespace-changes-in https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issue/6024/ability-to-igno... [3] https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issue/2874/ability-to-search-source-code-bb-39 https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issue/2874/ability-to-sear... [4] https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issue/4307/feature-request-contributor-statistics-bb https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issue/4307/feature-request...
andrijac 13y ago
I wish they had gist functionality like on GitHub. Otherwise, good service.
Ziomislaw 13y ago
why is Poland not allowed in? damn racists
gdonelli 13y ago
Free privare Repo! I am in!
rom16384 13y ago
Bitbucket is great with its free private repos, but I hope they'll add more payment methods, in particular PayPal.
dinduks 13y ago
I'm happy Bitbucket is doing great. Their free private repos helped me —as well as the classmates I've introduced to Git— working on our university projects efficiently. Thank you Bitbucket. :)
dgesang 13y ago
I'm wondering why so many people use bitbucket/github for their (commercial) projects instead of setting up their own repo management system (like RhodeCode). It's not hard to set up and you can have as much repositories as you want to.
- andy_adams 13y ago
  Just my opinion, but having a repo set up in 30 seconds vs. 2 hours (or whatever the overhead is for RhodeCode) is a big win when you have a million other things you're trying to piece together. Managing another system just means more headache. With hosted solutions, I'm all set.
nijk 13y ago
Why do I need a separate login account for MyAtlassian vs BitBucket?

447 points by Lightning 13y ago

hugi 13y ago

Bitbucket is great. I use it for all my private projects since it offers a much more sensible price structure than github (for me at least — github's model is based on number of repositories while bitbucket's is based on number of users).

RexM 13y ago

I recently stopped paying $12/month for github and moved all my private repositories to bitbucket. Since it's just me working on the repositories, it's totally free.

RivieraKid 13y ago
Me too. Public repos github, private bitbucket.
- kleiba 13y ago
  Honest question: why do you need a central repository (SVN style) if it's a private repo? I tend to develop my own projects mostly on two different machines, and the core code management and synchronization doesn't need anything but git itself. Is it so you can use bug trackers etc?
  - pbreit 13y ago
    Hmmm..how does synchronization work without a server or direct connection?
    - cmelbye 13y ago
      There's obviously a direct connection between the machines. Synchronization works exactly as it does when you synchronize with GitHub. It's just SSH.
      - pbreit 13y ago
        I don't think it's that obvious. Could be sneakernet, dropbox, etc. Is setting up a lasting direct connect easy?
        gohrt 13y ago
        You shouldn't be downvoted. It's not obvious how to use git to communicate between two client-configured machines. If one of them has a public domain name or IP, or they are both on the same LAN (likely when one is a laptop and they are owned by the same person), then it's simple to communicate via git. But, it wouldn't be so easy for, as an example, you and I to share code between our laptops in different time zones, unless we used a stable server somewhere.
  - mathrawka 13y ago
    Offsite data backup of the entire repository for free.
    - mkehrt 13y ago
      This is the truth.
    - amalag 13y ago
      I use bitbucket for this and also have it on s3 via Jgit
    - kleiba 13y ago
      I see. I suppose that makes sense if you mostly work on a single machine. (Since I usually oscillate between two machines I never think about backing up in addition to the normal work-flow.)
      - OGC 13y ago
        You should think about that in case your house burns down.
        kleiba 13y ago
        Frankly, I think that's exactly what I'm never worried about - especially not for my personal projects.
      - uniclaude 13y ago
        Even if you work on several machines, having not to worry about whether they are turned on / are accessible from wherever you are is a huge plus. People tend to have laptops nowadays, which you don't necessarily think about as always on computers.
        kleiba 13y ago
        Well, mine is always on. :-)
      - 13y ago
  - Osiris 13y ago
    I use Bitbucket with private repos for my code and websites. It makes it easier for me to use any of my computers or laptops to work on the same code and it also makes it easier to deploy to my webserver. When I want to deploy, I just do a git pull on the master branch. Easier than uploading files with SSH and it makes it a lot easier to rollback the server if needed.
  - acjohnson55 13y ago
    For me this comes up working on collaborative projects with multiple people
  - patrickg 13y ago
    For me it's easy to deploy the code onto a server which runs the code. I am not the only administrator, but the only software developer. I want the other admins to be able to pull code from that repository (bitbucket offers "read only ssh keys")
  - Lazare 13y ago
    Why not set up a private bitbucket repo, and just always push your code to bitbucket when you're done working, and pull when you start? It's a free offsite backup, and if you ever need to add another machine (or developer) to the project, your code is already sitting there on bitbucket. And you never need to worry about firewalls, NAT, one of the machines being off, whatever, because bitbucket is (almost) always up and accessible. And if you forget to push after working, or if bitbucket is down, you can still fall back to your existing workflow. In addition, if you're doing anything web based, sooner or later you'll need to deploy to a sever out on the internets. Being able to pull from bitbucket makes deployment really easy, again without tinkering with firewall ports or anything. It's not so much a question of "need" it's "why not do this thing which has some benefits, and no real downside?"
latj 13y ago
I really like bitbucket. The other day I actually looked at their pricing plans to see if their was a small plan I could upgrade to for additional features. I cant really even think of new features I need; And, the size of the free plan is good enough for me. I just really like the service. Weird.
grandalf 13y ago
I think Github unnecessarily is having a LOT of its lunch eaten by Bitbucket b/c of its unwillingness to let people just have a bunch of small private repos for low activity work.

sshconnection 13y ago

Glad to see Bitbucket doing so well. Their support is great, bailed us out of a nasty mess we got tangled up in our repo.

ckdarby 13y ago

The people in the comment are the first ACTUAL people I've met that use bitbucket >_>

rbehrends 13y ago
Tool usage patterns often exhibit social clustering. I.e., friends and colleagues tend to use similar tools, through a mixture of exposure, recommendation, similar work habits, shared constraints, etc. When the tool in question is about interacting with others (whether socially or professionally), it's naturally even more pronounced.
phaer 13y ago
I found it pretty popular in parts of the python community. And I guess it's used for a lot of private repositories.
- KPLauritzen 13y ago
  exactly, private repos. When you are talking about some OSS project it is often on github, but the authors might still have their private stuff on bitbucket. And there would be no reason to mention it.

akurilin 13y ago

Bitbucket is awesome, we're big fans.

pan69 13y ago

Recently starting using Bitbucket and I really like it. I find the team thing a bit difficult to understand and not very intuitive but it could be just me. I vaguely remember them also having SVN support but that seems to be no longer there. I guess I have re-import all my old repos using Git now.

isxek 13y ago
As far as I can remember, they started with providing Mercurial support, not SVN. Perhaps you were thinking of Google Code (they had SVN support, then Hg, then Git)?

hoka 13y ago

Congrats! Before GitHub had free private academic repos, I used Bitbucket and was really pleased. I'm out of school now, and I think I'll continue to use Bitbucket for private stuff. Great product!

IanChiles 13y ago
Bitbucket offers unlimited collaborators on your repos if you have an education email

speeder 13y ago

Kidoteca uses Bitbucket, because for us our GIT serving is free :) Also I use their SourceTree GUI GIT tool, it is really nice too. Now this is looking like a ad for Atlassian, I should charge them :P

Osiris 13y ago
SourceTree is great and it has both a Mac and Windows version which makes it easy for me to switch between my Mac and other PCs around the house.
- dminor 13y ago
  Easily the best git GUI on Windows that I've tried.
  - durzagott 13y ago
    I find SourceTree to be very slow and heavy. If I need to use a GUI then I find the built-in Gitk and GitGui more than adequate. They're not pretty, of course, but they do the job just fine.
- NicholasMurray 13y ago
  Yeah, SourceTree is easy to use and the latest release looks great. Although GitHub for Windows got me started with git, I much prefer SourceTree when I need a GUI (as a git nube).

imperialWicket 13y ago

Github has the social aspects nailed down, but for small teams or personal projects, I don't hesitate to use bitbucket. Particularly now that you can use HipChat for free on small teams, hosting with bitbucket and managing your project exclusively through Atlassian is fantastic. I like issue management in bitbucket much more than github, as well (personal opinion, no great foundation here).

tshepang 13y ago
What does "social aspects" mean? Number of users and/or something else?
- jpreiland 13y ago
  I would imagine the ease of sharing, searching, following, comments/discussion, pull requests, etc. I don't have any experience with Bitbucket yet other than making an account and poking around with the interface, so I don't really have a frame of reference, but GitHub does seem to do the above things quite well in my relatively limited experience.
- imperialWicket 13y ago
  GitHub definitely has more users (4.4m claimed https://github.com/features/community https://github.com/features/community), but I meant the social interaction capabilities and features that GitHub offers. GitHub is much more organized around community and public feedback (search, stars, comments, etc.), than BitBucket. IMO, neither is claiming to be something they aren't. It just happens that for private repos and hosting where the focus isn't discoverability or community-driven, BitBucket seems like an easy choice. However, if you want to integrate with communities or popular open source groups/code - GitHub is probably a better option. They're both great overlays for Git, it's just important to keep in mind where their core focus is. For GitHub, community is clearly a front-runner. BitBucket is more focused on private repo options and process management/tools. I put some sweeping claims in this comment, but there's a lot of really good data in this post to supplement.
  - 13y ago

riddim 13y ago

Bitbucket is an especially awesome resource for students. (Yes, I know GitHub offers free student accounts.) But the unlimited free private repositories makes it easy to back up tons of homework projects (as opposed to the small GitHub offering), without worrying about clogging your quota, or having your work available to the public.

rz2k 13y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if this has a lot to do with the latest growth. I've taken one or two Coursera courses (eg. [1]) where Bitbucket was specifically recommended for the private repositories. It would be a hassle to get counted as a student by Github without an edu email, and it would be too much for them to individually approve tens of thousands of people. [1] http://www.coursera.org/course/scicomp http://www.coursera.org/course/scicomp
- mcintyre1994 13y ago
  I know Bitbucket maintain a list of student Emails, I imagine Github do the same. They send a confirmation Email, you confirm, you get upgraded - all automatic. No reason to manually approve that. Bitbucket give students unlimited collaborators, but you probably don't need that for Coursera courses anyway.
  - rz2k 13y ago
    Bitbucket has a free tier for unlimited private repositories with 5 or fewer collaborators. Though you sign up with an email address, there is nothing about it being with "your school-issued email", because there is no stipulation about the tier being for students. Github will approve people for using a student email address even if their school doesn't give them an email account, but it happens on a case by case basis, with requirements such as requesting that you forward a scanned copy of your student ID. The difference is that Bitbucket does not ask you to be a student for the free account, so there is no process to prove that you are a student. Github has many advantages, but hassle-free, free private repositories is not one of them. What I was saying is that with the increase in students who are encouraged to use remote version control who may not have a student email account, or even a student ID, has likely contributed to the increase in users on Bitbucket. It is worth noting that some of these courses have more than 100,000 people sign up. Even if only a small fraction finish the courses, a small fraction use version control, and many are smaller, there have already been dozens of these courses conducted in the last year on Coursera, Udacity, and EdX.

ereckers 13y ago

I've been using them for a few years now. Free repos got me there. Assembla makes use of it as well, and I've run it through that on a project. I don't do enough open source stuff unfortunately to find myself at Github, but for maintaining a bunch of free private repos its great.

blktiger 13y ago
Assembla is it's own company and is not associated with Atlassian as far as I know.
oBeLx 13y ago
Assembla is an independent company: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembla http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembla
- ereckers 13y ago
  Thanks for the correction. I made the edit above. Funny thing is that I had a feeling I was wrong, but general sloppiness convinced me adding a question mark to my statement was better then taking 10 seconds to actually look it up.

dimascyriaco 13y ago

I use Bitbucket at work. And it stinks compared to Github.

imperialWicket 13y ago
I use both regularly, and while I definitely see areas that I like/dislike in each, I don't really see it as so one-sided. Care to elaborate on exactly what aspects cause such a dramatic swing for you?
heurist 13y ago
I have used both for a couple of years and the biggest difference I have noticed is that github has an open, social design while on bitbucket you feel like the only person on the site.
rrrhys 13y ago
I don't particularly see the difference and switch between both pretty much daily - granted I don't take advantage of Github social features really.
- fletchowns 13y ago
  If you don't take advantage of the Github social features, which is essentially what Github is all about, I don't think your opinion on the matter is worth sharing with everybody, no offense intended.
  - kibibu 13y ago
    Which social features would you say are missing, bearing in mind that Bitbucket has teams, issue tracking, wikis, pull requests and code review features?
    - fletchowns 13y ago
      My comment didn't have anything to do with any features that Bitbucket may or may not be missing, so I'm not sure why you are asking me that?

tn13 13y ago

I have been using Bitbucket for all my private projects. I think both BitBucket and Github can prosper together.

rsync 13y ago
You can improve this algorithm a bit by adding the string "compliments of the day to you!" to the output...

n9com 13y ago

We saved hundreds of dollars a month moving over to BitBucket last year.

fareesh 13y ago

Bitbucket is great. Glad to see them doing well.

sergiotapia 13y ago

If you're wondering how they can offer free private repositories (awesome!), it's probably because they also offer a ton of other tightly integrated services such as Crucible, JIRA, etc. JIRA is pretty sweet to keep things in order.

vyrotek 13y ago
JIRA is pretty sweet to keep things in order. Really? I use and love BitBucket, but the last 2 places I worked at used JIRA and it was the worst project management tool I've ever used. I'm sure someone will say they didn't configure it right or educate the devs or something. Seriously though, it was pushed down from upper management in both cases and it was a terrible experience. Then they thought Greenhopper would fix it, ha. (This was about 4+ years ago) Edit - According to the comments below it sounds like my experience was a result of trying to do too much with it. I just might play around with a bit just for some bug tracking with some of my BitBucket projects.
- Ingaz 13y ago
  In my experience it does not matter which tool is in hands of people who like to "tweak", "twist", "improve", etc. I've seen trac with "features", now I see JIRA with "features". JIRA itself is not bad as issue tracker. (Trac also is not bad)
  - fusiongyro 13y ago
    I think the core concept of Trac is great: automatic linking between issues, wiki pages and revisions. I think it suffers from being slow and difficult to install and configure, as well as using a very uncommon rendering engine that has really stymied theming. I use JIRA at work, and honestly it's completely fine. It's a goddamn bug tracker. If I can make bugs and close them it's doing its job. Nobody in my organization reads email or tracks their stuff anyway. Sometimes what you have are organizational/management problems, and no amount of wizzy technology is going to fix that.
- ripter 13y ago

wooptoo 13y ago

Mercurial is a better tool than Git in almost every aspect. It's easy to learn and gets out of your way. I chose it over git a few years ago and sticked with it ever since and used Bitbucket to host most of my stuff. You don't get the community that Github has, but the hosting is great.

VMG 13y ago
> Mercurial is a better tool than Git in almost every aspect. No need to proclaim personal tastes as absolute truths around here. In any case, Bitbucket has complete git support.
- drsintoma 13y ago
  > No need to proclaim personal tastes as absolute truths around here. In all fairness, we all do that a lot.
- ngoldbaum 13y ago
  Right, but github only allows, well, git repositories. If they added hg support I'd have a strong reason to think about putting repositories on my github account.
  - yawaramin 13y ago
    Adding hg support would be kinda awkward given their name.
seany 13y ago
I totally agree. Its one of those tools that stays out of your way unless you `need` to do something weird (unfortunately when you need to do that some times it can get really wierd). I feel like with git the base line is fairly complicated.
jlgreco 13y ago
I feel like I am taking crazy pills whenever somebody says that mercurial is simpler than git. Mercurial's per-file revlog and structured .hg/store/data is way weirder / more complex than git's SHA-addressed DAG with minimal/orthogonal object types. The only real blemish on git is that lightweight tags should not exist.

RVijay007 13y ago

Love bitbucket - use it exclusively for private projects and small group shared projects. If you sign up with a .edu account, you get free lifetime unlimited collaboration, which is awesome.

orangethirty 13y ago

Has bitbucket had any security issues like github has had in the past?

jespern 13y ago
We've never had a breach.
- kelnos 13y ago
  ... that you know of. I think the parent was asking a broader question, even including security issues that were brought up and fixed without being exploited.
rogerbinns 13y ago
They had one I reported Oct 2010, took a while to convince was an issue and they finally fixed a few months after saying they would. The URLS for attachments to private issues in private repos were guessable and publicly accessible if you guessed right (ie no authentication for them). The URLs were like this https://bitbucket-assetroot.s3.amazonaws.com/<username>/<reponame>/<date>/<ticketnumber>/attachmentname https://bitbucket-assetroot.s3.amazonaws.com/<username&#... Obviously a bit tedious to guess for humans, but no big deal for computers.
- orangethirty 13y ago
  Do you put this issue in the same level as the ones github has had?
  - rogerbinns 13y ago
    Issues always happen. It is how they are handled that makes the difference. I've not paid close attention to Github but it appears they react responsibly and quickly. With my issue it seemed like Bitbucket was a one man shop and I suspect that if I had thrown a fit things would have happened quickly. Jesper was attending pycon and I was fine with addressing it after that, but then it was not promptly attended to afterwards. I have no records of how long it took to fix but it was at least several weeks and may have been months. He did dispute "easily guessable". (The Bitbucket service at the time was also overwhelmed with languishing tickets.) In my own view, private data being accessible no matter how improbable is always an immediate issue. Issues that initially seem improbable get turned into the probable very quickly by the bad guys who are far more imaginative. But as I said this was late in 2010. I have no idea if the culture of Bitbucket has changed since then or is better.

hkmurakami 13y ago

It's awesome to have alternatives (especially those that offer a distinct value proposition compared to its competitors) and it' great to see them growing! :)

joeld42 13y ago

Bitbucket is great for small teams and individual work. Thanks for existing.

SEJeff 13y ago

I wonder how many users GitHub has.

reledi 13y ago
They have at least 3.5 million users [1]. They reached 1 million users in 2011 [2]. I wonder how many users are active on BB and GH though. In my case, I have an account for both but never use BB. [1] https://github.com/about/press https://github.com/about/press [2] https://github.com/blog/952-1-million-user-party-mon-oct-17-in-sf https://github.com/blog/952-1-million-user-party-mon-oct-17-...

spicer-matthews 13y ago

We use Bitbucket at Cloudmanic Labs we are pretty happy with it. GitHub almost has too many bells and whistles. We do use Github for public stuff as that is what everyone uses.

ellicottvilleny 13y ago

I love bitbucket but I would like to be able to create clusters of related BitBucket projects, by language, tool, etc. Right now there isn't even a search feature, let alone any browse capability.

jstepka 13y ago
Labels, repo groupings or something similar is on our mind too. No promises on the release date but it's something we've been thinking about. Justen - Bitbucket product manager

pbreit 13y ago

Bitbucket is nice as a Mercurial or Git repo service but Gihub is a phenomenon.

joeblau 13y ago
Yeah, but they don't offer free private repos. The only reason I use GitHub now is to host my open source projects. My company and personal stuff is on BitBucket.

jbarham 13y ago

It's worth noting that GitHub charges per repo whereas Bitbucket charges per user. So GitHub might make sense for product businesses where there are only a handful of repos, but Bitbucket is much more cost effective in an agency environment where you might have a repo per client or even per project.

gldnspud 13y ago

An interesting difference I've noticed about Bitbucket vs Github: While Github has had a "deploy key" feature for quite a while, and Bitbucket only added such a feature just under a year ago, I think Bitbucket's version is a much better fit for what deploy keys are usually used for. With Github, a deploy key has read-write access to repos, and each key can only be attached to a single repo. However, with Bitbucket, a deploy key has read-only access to repos, and each key can be attached to more than one repo.

ptolts 13y ago

Wish the contest was open to Canadians! I use Bitbucket, and its been great to me.

drawkbox 13y ago

I love bitbucket and even paid $10 before I had users for personal projects, now I pay since I have so many biz and client repos up there and growing teams. I have been recommending it for private repos/companies ever since and have gladly paid for it. You can store so much up there and unlimited repos in either Mercurial or Git which is awesome. For company/private repos I always use bitbucket, for OSS I use github. The prices are right, it's flexible and you can have the comfort of serviced repos off your local. It is great for remote teams or getting companies to open up to remote access to repos. I started using bitbucket when it was primarily python focused (github started ruby focused) and liked Mercurial since it was Python based and better supported on Windows back in the day for many windows clients. But they have definitely kept up and after Atlassian bought it they haven't dropped the ball. I also use SourceTree before they bought it and Atlassian knows good tools when they see them, bought that and opened it up (with a windows client in beta). Congrats to bitbucket from a happy customer for a long time.

hhandoko 13y ago
I completely agree. I picked BitBucket initially because Mercurial was better supported in Windows. I was even happier when they ported SourceTree to Windows. All I need now is the Mercurial support for it, so I can finally use a single client for both Git + Hg in Windows.

mhartl 13y ago

I've increasingly found myself using both GitHub and Bitbucket. In this vein, I just pushed up some changes to my list of Git utilities (https://github.com/mhartl/git-utils https://github.com/mhartl/git-utils) that includes full pull request support for both GitHub and Bitbucket on OS X. In particular, if you're on branch foobar and want to issue a pull request to merge with master, you just type $ git pull-request This pushes your local branch up to origin and opens the pull request page at GitHub or Bitbucket (depending on the relevant URL from .git/config). The same Git utils repo includes git open, which opens the remote page for your project: $ git open As with git pull-request, it works with both GitHub and Bitbucket (OS X only).

ausjke 13y ago

I have been using bitbucket for a few projects, awesome and thanks!

joering2 13y ago

Bitbucket is great but their Atlassian SourceTree software cannot be use anymore. It used to be fine couple versions ago, now the newest update does not even let you run it. I had to re-install couple times and nothing; only removing registries help. Also, some features are being taken away for no reason (like ability to remember to which branch you pushing, etc you have to re-check those again and again at each push).

snowpalmer 13y ago
I haven't experienced this problem.

dracoli 13y ago

Congrats to bitbucket. Love it cause of the free private repos. However whenever I see bitbucket I remember this spooning video made by them http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYBjVTMUQY0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYBjVTMUQY0

yawaramin 13y ago

I've been a Bitbucket member since 2009 and have an open source project (since 2010) as well as a few private repos. I've had users signing up simply to open issues and communicate with me. Works like a charm. They've always been top-notch but with git support and Atlassian's rising profile in the git community they're really starting to gain traction. I hope they keep up the good work.

AbhishekBiswal 13y ago

Just because of its free private repositories hosting plan. I am pretty sure there are more private repos on bitbucket than public repositories. And we already know where people go to host their public repositories.

dodo4711 13y ago

Bitbucket should add static web-hosting (aka User/Organization/Project pages). That would be a killer!

shuzchen 13y ago
See http://pages.bitbucket.org/ http://pages.bitbucket.org/ and https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/BITBUCKET/Publishing+a+Website+on+Bitbucket https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/BITBUCKET/Publishin...
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

vetler 13y ago

Congratulations, jespern!

reidrac 13y ago

Congratulations! One thing I miss in Bitbucket is repo discovery. There's no way, or at least I can't find it, to browse the repositories filtering by language, popularity, etc. 1 million users, I don't know how many repos, but I can tell you I've found lots of cool projects in GitHub thanks to to their search/browsing features. I may be wrong but I think Bitbucket needs that. (there's a bug report: https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issue/2934/browse-repositories-by-language-bb-39 https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issue/2934/browse-reposito...)

ngoldbaum 13y ago
There are a number of issues that I'd like to see bitbucket push on. [1], [2], [3], [4] to name a few. If they want to compete with github on features as well as pricing for private repos, they really need to address these things. [1] https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issue/2184/support-cnames-for-repositories-bb-3655 https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issue/2184/support-cnames-... [2] https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issue/6024/ability-to-ignore-whitespace-changes-in https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issue/6024/ability-to-igno... [3] https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issue/2874/ability-to-search-source-code-bb-39 https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issue/2874/ability-to-sear... [4] https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issue/4307/feature-request-contributor-statistics-bb https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issue/4307/feature-request...

andrijac 13y ago

I wish they had gist functionality like on GitHub. Otherwise, good service.

Ziomislaw 13y ago

why is Poland not allowed in? damn racists

gdonelli 13y ago

Free privare Repo! I am in!

rom16384 13y ago

Bitbucket is great with its free private repos, but I hope they'll add more payment methods, in particular PayPal.

dinduks 13y ago

I'm happy Bitbucket is doing great. Their free private repos helped me —as well as the classmates I've introduced to Git— working on our university projects efficiently. Thank you Bitbucket. :)

dgesang 13y ago

I'm wondering why so many people use bitbucket/github for their (commercial) projects instead of setting up their own repo management system (like RhodeCode). It's not hard to set up and you can have as much repositories as you want to.

andy_adams 13y ago
Just my opinion, but having a repo set up in 30 seconds vs. 2 hours (or whatever the overhead is for RhodeCode) is a big win when you have a million other things you're trying to piece together. Managing another system just means more headache. With hosted solutions, I'm all set.

nijk 13y ago

Why do I need a separate login account for MyAtlassian vs BitBucket?