Github - making great choices

Posted by Luke Bayes Wed, 09 Apr 2008 17:11:00 GMT

I’ve been flirting with Git for awhile now, but haven’t gotten around to using it on a ‘real’ project yet.

For me, it has been an amazingly useful tool for exploration and personal projects where I’m the only developer and I’d rather not go through the trouble and commitment of creating a real subversion repository on our servers.

As I’ve been using it more for these kinds of projects and some of them are growing beyond the initial conception, I’ve been looking into what it would take to host a git repository remotely.

As it turns out, some folks have put together an clean solution over at Github.

The experience of setting up a new account and repository is really fantastic, and you get a nice clean wiki for each project you create. They also have a great solution for integrating your git repository with a variety of other tooling services (like cruise control and bug tracking systems).

They support both private and public repositories, and private information is transmitted over SSH.

The best part about this service (from my perspective) is that they’re working on building an actual business. One where we acknowledge the value in what we’re receiving and pay a reasonable amount of money in return for that value. They have some potential pricing plans posted that look just fine to me. I’m just elated that they aren’t ever going to look like SourceForge!

Ali and I have been hosting our own Subversion repositories for years now and we’re about to run into an enormous upgrade expense (in cash, risk and time) that I’m really dreading.

These folks have really put together a clean solution and I wanted to congratulate them on their hard work. I’ll definitely be a customer.