Coming from a custom Gitolite [0] setup where I was able to protect branches and reject commits and do other basic or complex stuff with ease, GitHub looks like a joke. Their "improved" permissioning made me laugh. It doesn't even show signed commits, tags, and branches! Simply put, I like the "Hub", I hate the "Git" in GitHub.
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Coming from a personal computer with an operating system made later than the '70s where I can organize my collection of repositories hierarchically, I too find that Github looks like a joke.
I do not want my repositories to be all in a linear list, with my various chess projects, my various math projects, my various game projects, and so on all mixed up. And I do not want to resort to kludges like prefixing projects with chess- or math- or whatever as an inadequate workaround.
If your projects are public, you can create an org for each class of projects... tzs-math-demos/projectname for example.
It's not much better than prefixing, but it really isn't so bad... What gets me is the leftover cruft when I fork to make a patch to an upstream project.
This is voted down, but my organization found the Github pricing system awkward as hell, and we were competent enough to use Git without a condom, so Gitolite was a great fit for us.
Yes, charging per repository is nothing short of predatory. It means that every scratch project and every prototype needs to be deleted - or paid for in perpetuity.
It's even worse for agencies and contractors, since for them changing projects often is a natural part of business.
Even as a developer working on my first open source project I find the model a huge turn-off. I want to keep my repo private for now and it appears I have to pay. Instead I'm using Bitbucket which charges by the user -- far more reasonable model IMO.
Yeah, we're sort of in this odd space: GitHub has a lot of us "big tech" happy to be in a space with a lot of people collaborating, but we're having to spend pretty big in order to be productive.
Hmm. I had thought GH-Enterprise was monthly per-developer. Per repository sounds odd. So each fork is paid for independently?
No, Enterprise is per seat. x1024 is probably frustrated with paid accounts on github.com.
That's exactly true. But even GH Enterprise still has insane pricing.
Hosting a git repo and a very very basic issue tracker is so not worth $2500/year. Not to mention that even this isn't a fixed price and it grows linearly with the number of employees.
GitLab provides the same service for free. Well, at the cost of "you reading the manual and installing it on a VPS", which takes between "minutes" and "a couple of days" depending on how deep you want to go. A VPS that can easily - easily - scale to the needs of 100 people is "$5/mo".
Looking cool and having brand recognition will indeed earn you money, but everything has its limits.
> Well, at the cost of "you reading the manual and installing it on a VPS"
... And managing and maintaining that server and backups of it. $2500 a year starts to look pretty reasonable when you consider the amount it will cost you to put one of your developers on to setting it up and maintaining it. Not to mention the peace of mind of not having to worry about disaster recovery.
Setting up is a real cost, but I manage users on our corporate github and our self hosted gitolite; for github, the user gives me their username, and I add it (after looking up my password), gitolite I add their public key to a directory and their username to a file and git commit; git push. Not a lot of difference.
I don't worry about backing up the git repos, one of the promises of git is that every person who checks out the repo has a full copy, any of which we could use for a backup (helpful if we get a recent checkout).
Third party hosting hopefully has a good disaster recovery plan, but the disaster could be your hosting provider quietly went out of business and everything is offline.
Literally the only time I have had to administer my GitLab setup in any way was when my SSL certificate was about to expire. It's really very solid, and all of the user management can be done from the web front-end.
GitLab is easy to upgrade via apt-get/yum with the Omnibus packages. But if you want a maintenance free GitLab please consider GitLab.com or our GitHost.io service for single tenant hosting.
> Hosting a git repo and a very very basic issue tracker is so not worth $2500/year.
It's $250/year per developer, which is a rounding error at most software companies.
> It means that every scratch project and every prototype needs to be deleted - or paid for in perpetuity.
The same is true if you host yourself. Storage is neither free nor infinite. Sure you could scale your storage, but that costs, too. Unless you're absolutely strapped for cash, I think this just encourages good hygiene.
Scaling storage?
The highest public plan Github allows 125 repositories. Unless you have a lot of huge repositories, 125 repositories fit into a single smallish hard drive. Even with 10x redundancy, that's still cheaper than github.
Frankly, there are hard problems in internal IT, but hosting a bunch of git repositories is a non-issue.
To store all my repositories as private repositories on Github, I'd need the $200/month plan.
Yet all of this comes to less than a gigabyte, which is well under the limits of the free tiers at most major storage providers.
In terms of storage costs, Github for most projects is several orders of magnitude more expensive than other storage providers even if you ignore the free tiers.
Storage is neither free nor infinite but in relation to the overhead of a git repository its cost is too small to be measured in cents.
It's worth noting, that if you have SSH access that includes filesystem access, you can use that as a git remote target, without the need for a GUI, if it's for personal projects.
I've done precisely that for personal projects in the past, as well as for a couple small teams as an intermediate step towards hosted git. I support GH mainly because they are supporting open-source... it's indirect, but I support the model.
As another alternative to GitHub, we are using GitLab CE on-premises. This is the open-source version and we've been pretty happy with it in a team of 50. And if you want support and some extra features, then the pricing is much more reasonable than GitHub & GitHub Enteprise.
Having used both GitHub and GitLab pretty extensively I could only recommend GitLab if self-hosted and cost are your primary requirements. That being said GitLab is an impressive product given the development forces behind each.
Hi nnutter, what can we improve in GitLab to have you recommend it for all use cases?
I'll make an effort to take notes over the next few weeks and put something up on the issue tracker. To be absolutely clear I think GitLab is pretty good I'd just prefer and recommend GitHub still if self-hosted and cost weren't the primary requirements.
Thanks in advance for taking notes and posting to the issue tracker!
I agree. Github works and really shines for "developer"-centric small teams.
You mix in larger number of developers, add in QA, testing, release, issue tracking states between them and it becomes a pain. Having to implements bots, API keys other stuff like that.
Not all tools work for everyone. What works for individuals and small teams doesn't work for larger teams.
I saw this twice both at a smaller company and larger one. Starting with Github. Hit pain points and then picking something else. In one case was about buying Jira + Confluence, because it was about issue tracking states. In another not sure yet. But lots of bots and rules and automatic pull requests and merges is becoming a pain and might end up with Gitlab or something else soon.
I'm not sure I agree. While I love it as an open source tool, GitHub is an awful code review interface.
You might want to give https://reviewable.io a try. :) (Disclosure: my project.)
Definitely sounds like a cultural mismatch between your work environment and the expected github work environment.
I don't think that's the case. I work at a startup with a fairly permissive commit policy (forgiveness > permission), and because of how Github is architected, we have to put policies in place about which branches someone can/should commit to in READMEs (branch X should always build, branch Y should is where code get staged for tested, and so forth), instead of within the tooling.
As someone at Google once said, "If your policy doesn't exist in software, it doesn't exist."
How can essential Git features be a mismatch? For example, the CI can sign release tags, and you can deploy them with confidence. GitHub is not a small company. Gitolite is developed mainly by a single guy. Okay, there's no pretty UI, but developing one nowadays is not a huge task. The way Gitolite can handle a significant feature set is very elegant! I'm surprised GitHub behaves like they don't know about the existence of Gitolite!
Is this the proper use of Ironic? Complaining about Github by mentioning a superior alternative that is hosted on Github?
To reiterate: they host it for the Hub, not for the Git in GitHub! We dream for the day when GitHub will be capable of working with external Git repositories!