These projects are mainly side projects, or small freelance jobs I've done through the years, and I want to save them for posterity; who knows when I'll need them, right?
My solution to this problem is called tar. Just clone the Git repos to /tmp, tar up the results, and push the tarball to S3. Done. Archived for posterity for a few cents per month.
This isn't SVN anymore: It doesn't take special voodoo to host a repo. If nobody needs to push or pull from a repo, tar it up and archive it. If one person needs to push and pull from a repo, store it on that person's local hard drive (with backups, of course). If two people need to push and pull from a repo... Well, this is no longer an archive for posterity, this is an active project, and can the team really not afford to pay Github something like $5 per month per repo?
this is an active project, and can the team really not afford to pay Github something like $5 per month per repo?
This is the OP's complaint: once you're over 20 private repositories, you're paying $100/month. He wants stupid-simple, hosted, private git repositories, and lots of them. He probably ran a bunch of numbers on servers, storage, and bandwidth, and found that he run a simple, low-cost hosted git solution (without all the fancy web features) at a fraction the cost.
There was an opportunity in the market to make a simple, low-cost competitor to github, and he built it. Kudos.
Technically, yes.. waving your command line wand IS a solution. But also, technically, there isn't any reason why you shouldn't be able to keep 100+ small remote git repositories active for less than $100/month.
Also, Github doesn't require you to know how to use tar, S3, or have any other Linux experience. So why should this particular use case? Why wouldn't a business be able to cater to that market?
This is a business, and as such, should be measured as one. Why are we criticizing the "technical necessity" of the product? Are we under the impression that HN is the target audience?
The killer feature of codeplane is cheap shared private git repositories. If you are the only person using your git repo, there is no reason you wouldn't store your remote on some random webhost (you can do this at http://nearlyfreespeech.net for essentially free).
If you want to collaborate with this setup, you would need to create a system-level account for every collaborator on your VPS (ugly) or install something like gitolite (https://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite).
The downside to gitolite is then you are running your own VPS, i.e. are responsible for security, updates, config, etc. It seems codeplane takes care of all the nonsense for you so you can get on with your real project.
As someone who had to set up gitolite because of this exact need, I can attest to the need for a service like codeplane.
I imagine part of the use case is "quickly and easily getting back to a snippet within one of those old files", in which case the tarball and archive method won't really work.
While I do agree that Github leaves space for a model like this, I think the value of Github is that it offers a great community and awesome toolset (online and offline). Then I read this:
"I also wanted to do almost everything from my terminal, so I built a CLI, that you can use to manage repositories, public keys and collaborators. For daily usage, you probably won't have to go to our web interface ever again, and that's awesome!"
And I think "that's what I have with Gitosis on my VPS" (Gitosis uses git to manage user accounts and keys, so it pretty much doesn't get simpler than that). Companies pay for Github for the tools, developers who use CLI are probably not that interested in forking $9 a month for something they already have. Just my two cents, but I wish you the best of luck :)
I think it's a great idea. It would cost me more then $9/mo to setup a box(VPS). Not to mention the hour+ it would take to actually set it up(my time isn't free). Backup isn't a huge issue since it's git and presumably you have multiple devs and dev boxes with a copy of the code.
What might be even more useful and cheaper would be a reverse proxy service that allows you to share your local repo on the public internet. Like showoff.io for git.
The repo limit on github does seem a little bit silly. Limit by disk space makes much more sense.
I still use SVN for a lot of my own personal projects (don't judge me!) and sure I could setup my own SVN server no problem. But I pay a small fee ($50 a year I think.. or maybe $50/6-mos) for SVN hosting.
Same situation: I want private repo's. Past that, the only other thing I really want is not to have to worry about ANYTHING. It needs to be secure, backed-up, and quick, without me ever having to give it a 2nd thought.
I just use bitbucket.org + Mercurial. More than enough for personal projects, or more, given that it's unlimited. The only limit is amount of users.
Switching to Hg was a bit of work, but I've actually learned to like it more than Git. Really though, it's the same kind of thing and I just use both. So I ended up at bitbucket for the same reasons OP built a new site.
You can set something like this up on any VPS with gitolite (https://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite) pretty easily. gitolite lets you set up very fine-grained per-user/repo/branch permissions, manage your users' SSH keys, and gives you nice clean [email protected]:repo-name access to your remotes.
I've done this for myself with a $48/year VPS from prgmr.com specifically because I needed more private repos than Github could offer (my setup instructions are here: https://gist.github.com/1035834).
Granted, if codeplane.com existed six months ago I probably wouldn't have bothered with gitolite. It appears they do nice things for you like backups.
Gitosis does not have as fine grained control as gitolite nor is it as well documented (config file errors are hard to debug), but it works well within its limitations. Both are now available as Debian/Ubuntu packages (gitolite was not when I started using gitosis). The other obvious difference is that gitolite is written in Perl and gitosis is written in Python. This should be a superficial difference, but sometimes the world isn't rational.
Would there be a market for gitolite/gitosis hosting? Say, $1/mo for up to 1G of space, backed up, unlimited private/public repos, cli only, rudimentary web viewer for public repos via gitweb.
It's rather easy to set it up (as the comments here suggest), but seems like a lot of folks wouldn't want to go into trouble of learning about it and/or setting it all up properly, or don't have a server to put it on.
Gitolite suffers from being well documented for an open source project yet still very hard to understand from a standing start - it's just not a very intuitive setup. I wrote a post on setting it up just to help me wrap my head around it.
I do this (also on prgmr) and manage backups with tarsnap+cron which with all my small repos costs nearly nothing even if I don't clean up old tarsnap archives.
I run a services company. I am near my limit for 125 private projects with mega plan.
I have 100+ private repositories,with about 100 collaborators(many are my clients) and consume just 2.3 gb and pay 100$/month, about 15-20 of the projects are live/active, others are projects which have been delivered or on hold.
Organization as a concept was brought pretty recently on github, my account dates 2008, charging double for just that is not attractive.
I love github, they are coming with awesome features, but in terms of certain features many service firms need, a way to archive the project not counting them for active projects. github is lacking. instead of doubling the service plan every 6-9 months I am willing to give the competing git hosting services a try
Github's pricing model really is a painpoint for little consulting shops. We drive next to no traffic and storage on there, but we do a few projects every quarter. Haven't quite outgrown our paid plan yet, but we will in a bit.
Just wish Github would revise their pricing to support peeps like us, I hate to use different interfaces. May choose to just archive things to codeplane until then, keeping things we are actively developing on github.
Same feature set as http://repositoryhosting.com with a higher price point (they're at $6/month now for 2GB). They don't have a CLI or anything as far as I know but they do offer more storage space at $1/GB/month which is pretty nice if you just need a little extra.
I think CodePlane is very cool, but it seems to solve a different problem than the one advertised on the blog.
To save my repos "for posterity" on Github without incurring a $100/month bill, I simply create a master repo (say old-projects/) with all my unused repos in it.
On the other hand CodePlane seems to be a great solution for collaborative work on lots of private repos. This can save big bucks.
I love to see projects like this. I hope it gains some traction and forces Github to change their business model to a more manageable per-GB price.
The one-repo-for-old-projects solution works in some cases, but not really for mine. As a contract developer I often have projects that are under active development for a few months and then go into "maintenance mode". In this case I want separate repos for when maintenance needs to happen. Otherwise that one repo is a mess.
I believe this is the kind of problem that CodePlane solves. And I agree with you that its great to see projects like this present competition and make GitHub better in the long run.
I like this business model better. You pay for what you use, not how you use it. Its moving away from the Microsoft plan of "to use this for business you must pay me double".
Its like a ford salesman asking you about how you plan on using your ford focus, oh you will be driving to work? Highway driving costs you 50% extra. Sorry. You can take our back-alley car for cheap though.
as arturadib mentioned, you can make the "old-projects" repo. But that's just a hack/workaround for a wrong business model. Though I am sure this business model is much more profitable.
I wanted to solve both problems. I have 40+ repos, but about 50% are archives only. So, with 2GB I can store them and I also work on my current projects.
What does the UI actually look like? Is it just the list of repositories? I'd be more likely to spend money if there was a tour, or an example project I could look at, or an annotated example session with the CLI tool.
This is a very desirable use case. For those who don't get it, I'd say the following:
- it's nice to use git for all the small side projects one creates, but putting all of them on github is crazy expensive if you like keeping your musings private (though not necessarily b/c you're committed to a closed source ideology :)
- the cost factor creates an incentive to misuse git (not using submodules where appropriate) just to save money.
- There are a lot of awesome Git UI programs that run locally on my laptop, gitk is one.
- FWIW his fills the niche between github and gist.
Maybe I'm not fully understanding this.. If I don't need the web interface and public code sharing, why would I use this verse getting a Linode instance and installing git there.
> If I don't need the web interface and public code sharing, why would I use this verse getting a Linode instance and installing git there.
Private code sharing. You have to install something like gitolite (see my other comment) to do private code sharing with git on a VPS, or you'd have to create a system-level user for every person you want to share code with.
I know I don't need a web interface, at the same time I know people that loves and only uses the UI. Why not solving this specific problem and still making all other users happy?
I am currently frustrated with Github's private repository hosting plans. When I switched from SVN to Git, what was initially one repository became six, because of Git's "you can't checkout part of a repo" philosophy. So now, I have to buy a fairly expensive plan even though my usage is pretty small.
Cheers, to you for adding some competition to the marketplace. I hope it provides some pricing pressure on Github one of these days.
> Please note: While we do not guarantee our free services, we do want to build a long-term relationship with you. So, even if you sign up today for a free plan, and we discontinue that plan, we provide service for at least a year after you sign up. We will add and remove our Free offers to meet customer demand. Enjoy what we have posted today, and check back regularly for additional offerings!
The UI at Assembla is awkward to work with. I participated in a project that used Assembla, and I kept getting a flood of emails attached to tasks and revisions that I didn't want to follow.
Assembla is not really a GIT hosting, it's project management with repos. You can use tickets, wiki, internal forum, GIT/Mercurial/SVN repos and some build/deploy tools.
Admittedly some of their tools have small problems, but the team is responsive and improves it steadily.
I've used one of their paid programs for everything we do (must be about two years by now) and I would recommend it.
Assembla doesn't seem to have that social aspect like Github, but I find their combination of tickets, wiki, forum and repos more useful.
I hadn't gotten around to commenting, and I'm glad it took me a while, because while I first went to Codeplane and set up a trial account, pushed my Github private repos therem and downgraded my account from a paid to an unpaid account — thereby netting myself a free cheap beer a month — I went on to read some of the comments here, set up gitosis, and am now free of any sort of paid git hosting fees beyond my existing Linode virtualized server — upgrading my free monthly drink from a PBR to a Hendrick's martini.
Good for you for building this and then charging for it. There certainly is a place in the market for what you are doing and the price you are doing it.
I've always wondered about this. The real expenses are disk space and bandwidth. I don't understand how they can't just provide a space-based plan (oh yeah, that would cut into high margins).
It's a wonderful service and they've done so much to keep many open source projects from stagnating. They outshine SourceForge and Google Code by a large margin. Still, if BitBucket was git, I might migrate my stuff.
The thing is "social coding" isn't that big of a plus for your own private stuff. I definitely see value in a service like this.
[+] [-] mechanical_fish|14 years ago|reply
These projects are mainly side projects, or small freelance jobs I've done through the years, and I want to save them for posterity; who knows when I'll need them, right?
My solution to this problem is called tar. Just clone the Git repos to /tmp, tar up the results, and push the tarball to S3. Done. Archived for posterity for a few cents per month.
This isn't SVN anymore: It doesn't take special voodoo to host a repo. If nobody needs to push or pull from a repo, tar it up and archive it. If one person needs to push and pull from a repo, store it on that person's local hard drive (with backups, of course). If two people need to push and pull from a repo... Well, this is no longer an archive for posterity, this is an active project, and can the team really not afford to pay Github something like $5 per month per repo?
[+] [-] frederickcook|14 years ago|reply
This is the OP's complaint: once you're over 20 private repositories, you're paying $100/month. He wants stupid-simple, hosted, private git repositories, and lots of them. He probably ran a bunch of numbers on servers, storage, and bandwidth, and found that he run a simple, low-cost hosted git solution (without all the fancy web features) at a fraction the cost.
There was an opportunity in the market to make a simple, low-cost competitor to github, and he built it. Kudos.
[+] [-] evlapix|14 years ago|reply
Also, Github doesn't require you to know how to use tar, S3, or have any other Linux experience. So why should this particular use case? Why wouldn't a business be able to cater to that market?
This is a business, and as such, should be measured as one. Why are we criticizing the "technical necessity" of the product? Are we under the impression that HN is the target audience?
[+] [-] masnick|14 years ago|reply
If you want to collaborate with this setup, you would need to create a system-level account for every collaborator on your VPS (ugly) or install something like gitolite (https://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite).
The downside to gitolite is then you are running your own VPS, i.e. are responsible for security, updates, config, etc. It seems codeplane takes care of all the nonsense for you so you can get on with your real project.
As someone who had to set up gitolite because of this exact need, I can attest to the need for a service like codeplane.
[+] [-] jpeterson|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] runjake|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scorpion032|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] micheljansen|14 years ago|reply
"I also wanted to do almost everything from my terminal, so I built a CLI, that you can use to manage repositories, public keys and collaborators. For daily usage, you probably won't have to go to our web interface ever again, and that's awesome!"
And I think "that's what I have with Gitosis on my VPS" (Gitosis uses git to manage user accounts and keys, so it pretty much doesn't get simpler than that). Companies pay for Github for the tools, developers who use CLI are probably not that interested in forking $9 a month for something they already have. Just my two cents, but I wish you the best of luck :)
[+] [-] doki_pen|14 years ago|reply
What might be even more useful and cheaper would be a reverse proxy service that allows you to share your local repo on the public internet. Like showoff.io for git.
The repo limit on github does seem a little bit silly. Limit by disk space makes much more sense.
[+] [-] encoderer|14 years ago|reply
Same situation: I want private repo's. Past that, the only other thing I really want is not to have to worry about ANYTHING. It needs to be secure, backed-up, and quick, without me ever having to give it a 2nd thought.
For that, I'm happy to pay this small fee.
[+] [-] fnando|14 years ago|reply
Maybe for hackers like us... ;)
[+] [-] naz|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrcharles|14 years ago|reply
Switching to Hg was a bit of work, but I've actually learned to like it more than Git. Really though, it's the same kind of thing and I just use both. So I ended up at bitbucket for the same reasons OP built a new site.
My way was quicker though.
[+] [-] masnick|14 years ago|reply
I've done this for myself with a $48/year VPS from prgmr.com specifically because I needed more private repos than Github could offer (my setup instructions are here: https://gist.github.com/1035834).
Granted, if codeplane.com existed six months ago I probably wouldn't have bothered with gitolite. It appears they do nice things for you like backups.
[+] [-] gvb|14 years ago|reply
Gitosis does not have as fine grained control as gitolite nor is it as well documented (config file errors are hard to debug), but it works well within its limitations. Both are now available as Debian/Ubuntu packages (gitolite was not when I started using gitosis). The other obvious difference is that gitolite is written in Perl and gitosis is written in Python. This should be a superficial difference, but sometimes the world isn't rational.
[+] [-] senko|14 years ago|reply
It's rather easy to set it up (as the comments here suggest), but seems like a lot of folks wouldn't want to go into trouble of learning about it and/or setting it all up properly, or don't have a server to put it on.
[+] [-] exratione|14 years ago|reply
http://www.exratione.com/2011/03/setting-up-an-access-contro...
Since I maintain my own sites anyway, keeping as many private repositories as I want is basically free once this is set up.
[+] [-] mestudent|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] senthilnayagam|14 years ago|reply
I have 100+ private repositories,with about 100 collaborators(many are my clients) and consume just 2.3 gb and pay 100$/month, about 15-20 of the projects are live/active, others are projects which have been delivered or on hold.
Organization as a concept was brought pretty recently on github, my account dates 2008, charging double for just that is not attractive.
I love github, they are coming with awesome features, but in terms of certain features many service firms need, a way to archive the project not counting them for active projects. github is lacking. instead of doubling the service plan every 6-9 months I am willing to give the competing git hosting services a try
[+] [-] fizx|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bad_user|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicpottier|14 years ago|reply
Just wish Github would revise their pricing to support peeps like us, I hate to use different interfaces. May choose to just archive things to codeplane until then, keeping things we are actively developing on github.
[+] [-] pdenya|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slig|14 years ago|reply
Also, they offer git, mercurial and SVN.
[+] [-] arturadib|14 years ago|reply
To save my repos "for posterity" on Github without incurring a $100/month bill, I simply create a master repo (say old-projects/) with all my unused repos in it.
On the other hand CodePlane seems to be a great solution for collaborative work on lots of private repos. This can save big bucks.
I love to see projects like this. I hope it gains some traction and forces Github to change their business model to a more manageable per-GB price.
[+] [-] sant0sk1|14 years ago|reply
I believe this is the kind of problem that CodePlane solves. And I agree with you that its great to see projects like this present competition and make GitHub better in the long run.
[+] [-] dlikhten|14 years ago|reply
Its like a ford salesman asking you about how you plan on using your ford focus, oh you will be driving to work? Highway driving costs you 50% extra. Sorry. You can take our back-alley car for cheap though.
as arturadib mentioned, you can make the "old-projects" repo. But that's just a hack/workaround for a wrong business model. Though I am sure this business model is much more profitable.
[+] [-] fnando|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zck|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamesgeck0|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grandalf|14 years ago|reply
- it's nice to use git for all the small side projects one creates, but putting all of them on github is crazy expensive if you like keeping your musings private (though not necessarily b/c you're committed to a closed source ideology :)
- the cost factor creates an incentive to misuse git (not using submodules where appropriate) just to save money.
- There are a lot of awesome Git UI programs that run locally on my laptop, gitk is one.
- FWIW his fills the niche between github and gist.
[+] [-] lucian1900|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] angrycoder|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] masnick|14 years ago|reply
Private code sharing. You have to install something like gitolite (see my other comment) to do private code sharing with git on a VPS, or you'd have to create a system-level user for every person you want to share code with.
[+] [-] fnando|14 years ago|reply
Makes sense?
[+] [-] initself|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xbryanx|14 years ago|reply
Cheers, to you for adding some competition to the marketplace. I hope it provides some pricing pressure on Github one of these days.
[+] [-] yakto|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yakto|14 years ago|reply
> Please note: While we do not guarantee our free services, we do want to build a long-term relationship with you. So, even if you sign up today for a free plan, and we discontinue that plan, we provide service for at least a year after you sign up. We will add and remove our Free offers to meet customer demand. Enjoy what we have posted today, and check back regularly for additional offerings!
[+] [-] barkingcat|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Revisor|14 years ago|reply
Admittedly some of their tools have small problems, but the team is responsive and improves it steadily.
I've used one of their paid programs for everything we do (must be about two years by now) and I would recommend it.
Assembla doesn't seem to have that social aspect like Github, but I find their combination of tickets, wiki, forum and repos more useful.
[+] [-] joomlaace|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BlazingFrog|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edw|14 years ago|reply
Thank you, fellow Hacker News citizens.
[+] [-] programminggeek|14 years ago|reply
Good job.
[+] [-] fnando|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flocial|14 years ago|reply
It's a wonderful service and they've done so much to keep many open source projects from stagnating. They outshine SourceForge and Google Code by a large margin. Still, if BitBucket was git, I might migrate my stuff.
The thing is "social coding" isn't that big of a plus for your own private stuff. I definitely see value in a service like this.
[+] [-] kgtm|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fnando|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taphangum|14 years ago|reply