Gogs, an alternative to Gitlab

Gogs, an alternative to Gitlab(apertoire.net)

424 points by apertoire 11 years ago | 231 comments

gkoberger 11 years ago |

I love OSS, however I hate this argument:

"You could certainly purchase access to private Github repositories, but most certainly you’d rather want to invest your capital in more pressing matters."

That's their #1 reason? GitHub is, like, $7. If that saves you 10 minutes of having to maintain your own servers? Completely seems worth it to me. Or, GitLab or BitBucket have free private repos.

My argument is this: your time is the most important thing you have, and you shouldn't be wasting your time on maintaining your own source control servers.

slg 11 years ago | |

Time is often managed at a lower pay scale than money and is less likely to be micromanaged. It is generally easier for a developer or manager to squeeze in a few extra hours working on a specific need than it is to get the equivalent money dedicated to the exact same issue. This is probably because most companies look at their employee's salaries as sunk costs and fail to factor in the opportunity cost of an employee's time. Not saying that is the correct way to do things, just what I have discovered through experience.

hashtree 11 years ago | |

I really wish GitHub only counted private repos that have more than one collaborator. If you are like me and have dozens and dozens of smaller repos that only you yourself work on, it makes the GitHub model a non-starter (and I'd love to be GitHub only, rather hosting my own server or using bitbucket).

SoftwareMaven 11 years ago | | |

For a private repo with just yourself, why not use BitBucket? You don't need any of the social features of Github in that case.

Ygg2 11 years ago | | |

How would Github differentiate between you and another collaborator that uses your logon details?

drinchev 11 years ago | | |

Yeah. I pay for GitHub micro plan and indeed for my personal libraries I use bitbucket. It got a decent cli so I create the remote repo from my terminal.

I would love to use GitHub more, but it becomes pricey for 20+ repos.

abrkn 11 years ago | |

I think it's unfair to compare self-hosted to shared hosting. GitHub Enterprise is not $7 self-hosted. It's $5K/year.

vandahm 11 years ago | |

For my personal stuff, I'm happy to pay GitHub to host my private repositories, but it's not always that simple. I work for a large, bureaucratic corporation in a heavily regulated industry. If something costs money -- even a dollar -- someone has to pay for it, which means that someone has to approve the expense, which means you need a risk assessment and permission from legal. Even if it doesn't cost money, there are a lot of bureaucratic hassles associated with using external services to store company IP. Sure, maintaining your own source control server takes time, but so do the alternatives.

mrmondo 11 years ago | |

It's not really that simple. For people that already do it - managing servers is easy and doesn't take much time at all. One of the main reasons to run your own code repo is that you're in control of your data and you're not limited by the performance or features of the upstream vendor. Not to mention how much faster having your code repo running internally is - when you have 100 people commit code to and from git all day along with using other 'cloud' products you end up eating up a lot of bandwidth - and in many countries that's really expensive (Australia being one of them).

Remember companies that sell cloud services have a vested interest in making you believe that it always makes financial sense to use a cloud hosted product which as those of us that have experience in both cloud hosted and on site deployments will tell you is not always the case.

lelandbatey 11 years ago | | |

Exactly. I have a somewhat beefy server that I continue to use just for personal things. Once you're well acquainted with self hosting, the successive time investment drops dramatically, and the rewards become substantial.

At this point, my server replaces:

    - A site host
    - Image host
    - Streaming video service (Netflix replacement)
    - File host (Dropbox replacement)
    - Build server
    - Git repository host
    - Proxy
    - Render server
    - Hosts all the random webapps I write
    - Game hosting

By spending my time, I not only get these services, but the expertise to manage and run other services. It's less rewarding in the short term, since I certainly didn't get all this right when I bought the thing, but at this point I am getting a ton of return on my invested time.

67726e 11 years ago | |

Well, your salary is something of a sunk cost. Now depending on the amount of time spent managing that GitLab server, it might make financial sense. If it is truly easy to maintain as they seek, and claim, then it just might make sense.

Consider the organization that needs hosted GitHub enterprise - a pricey proposition. Unless you could otherwise have spent your time working on a feature that would directly increase sales (which is probably unlikely in an enterprise locale) then your time really is just sunk cost.

So to recap, for the one-off private repo - probably easier and more sensible in terms of resources to use GitHub. For a large organization that has man hours to burn or otherwise needs an in-house hosted solution, GitLab (or Gogs) could make sense.

yoklov 11 years ago | | |

GitLab has been ridiculously easy to manage for us. Really my only complaint is that it's slow as all hell, and gives up too early on a lot of pages because of this.

Still, compared to the Perforce server crashing every other week (a slight exaggeration, but still), it's a marked improvement.

SEJeff 11 years ago | |

Some people also have regulatory reasons to store their code on-premise. Sometimes the "correct" answer is to hire a team of sysadmins and one of their responsibilities is to maintain a SCM infra in-house. It really isn't that hard.

levosmetalo 11 years ago | |

> My argument is this: your time is the most important thing you have, and you shouldn't be wasting your time on maintaining your own source control servers.

And then you wrote this comment, spending these alleged pair of minutes bragging about how cheap it is to just pay for something.

On the other hand, I remember spending a fair bit of time and energy at my current company to get approved 10$ per month Bitbucket plan. Let's say it took us months to actually get it declined. Then, we happily spent 200$ per month for a virtual machine that we had to maintaint and ended up installing Gitblit.

superuser2 11 years ago | |

That's if you only have 5 repos. If you don't want to be forced into the 1-big-repo thing and have many discrete projects/microservices, GitHub gets really expensive fast.

I'd love to use GitHub for my personal projects but there are too many different ones.

I wish it were metered by what it actually costs them (storage) rather than stupid arbitrary numbers like repo count.

mmgutz 11 years ago | |

Until you have to deploy something with automated provisioning tools and Github or Bitbucket is down. It has happened a few times. We use gitolite with no UI for this very reason.

cgag 11 years ago | |

My argument would be your freedom is the most important thing you have, and you shouldn't throw it away for the convenience of github.

sytse 11 years ago | |

Some people have way more than 5 repositories that a $7 plan brings. Also, if you don't want to host it yourself, GitLab.com has free private and public repositories https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/

gkoberger 11 years ago | | |

For the record, I think GitLab is awesome :) There's a ton of amazing reasons for large companies to use GitLab (storing your own data, customization, etc) that I completely stand by.

My umbrage is simply with the price argument Gogs lead with; it'll always end up cheaper to use GitHub (or another hosted solution) than to run your own.

sytse 11 years ago |

Hi, GitLab CEO here. Installing GitLab should take only 2 minutes with the Omnibus packages available on https://about.gitlab.com/downloads/

Upgrading GitLab is as simple as:

    sudo gitlab-ctl stop unicorn
    sudo gitlab-ctl stop sidekiq
    sudo gitlab-rake gitlab:backup:create
    sudo dpkg -i gitlab_x.x.x-omnibus.xxx.deb
    sudo gitlab-ctl reconfigure

And we're working very hard to make sure this is a flawless, uneventful & boring process for 100% of the users https://twitter.com/PentiumBug/status/569930640725946368 We're also working on a package server so you can just use apt-get to upgrade.

geerlingguy 11 years ago |

I've been trying both Gogs and GitLab locally for personal projects, and like both for different purposes. GitLab seems to have an edge in terms of larger organizational usage and integrations... but Gogs is faster for smaller orgs and way simpler to set up and manage.

I have a couple quick demo Vagrant configurations you can use to spin up both and choose for yourself which one you like better:

  - Gogs: https://github.com/geerlingguy/ansible-vagrant-examples/tree/master/gogs
  - GitLab: https://github.com/geerlingguy/ansible-vagrant-examples/tree/master/gitlab

sytse 11 years ago | |

Thanks for the Vagrant image! We like to think that GitLab is simple to setup and manage if you use the Omnibus packages.

Also, another vagrant installer is https://github.com/tuminoid/gitlab-installer

macmac 11 years ago | |

Thanks for the vagrant files, super easy to set up.

izolate 11 years ago |

We moved to Gogs. GitLab was too slow, and started giving us random 500 errors (fatal bug).

Overall, it's been more enjoyable than Gitlab. Things I don't like:

* No pull requests / issues

* No deploy keys

* It's a full on GitHub replacement in the sense that anybody can sign up to your Gogs instance and use it. Who's using it that way? Would be much better if it were built for one organization with a way to group repos into projects.

apetresc 11 years ago | |

"No pull requests" and "It's a full on GitHub replacement" seem like incompatible statements.

mangoman 11 years ago | | |

I think what he meant was "Why can anyone signup for my Gogs server?" It'd still be nice to have pull requests across teams, or even just as a place for code reviews.

timtadh 11 years ago | | |

You can always use another code review tool to do pull requests. You can also do it the way Linus does with pull request emails (git request-pull).

It isn't really a deal breaker to not have it built in. There are other ways to use git than following rigidly to the current github model.

taylorlapeyre 11 years ago | | |

Yeah, no pull requests is an instant deal breaker.

sytse 11 years ago | |

GitLab CEO here, I'm sorry to hear you experienced 500 errors. That shouldn't happen. Did you use our Omnibus packages? https://about.gitlab.com/downloads/ Anyway, if you want to look into it email me at sytse@gitlab.com

lifty 11 years ago | | |

I have to say, I appreciate your willingness and approach in solving problems and improving your product. Keep up the good work!

the_angry_angel 11 years ago | |

> anybody can sign up to your Gogs instance and use it.

It's possible to turn off the registration feature. I've got it integrated into our Active Directory.

It's possible to get project "groups" by creating an organisation per project.

klaruz 11 years ago |

Why do I rarely see Gitblit talked about as an open source alternative to GitHub? It does a lot: http://gitblit.com/features.html, including a well thought out ticket workflow: http://gitblit.com/tickets_overview.html It's also very easy to install, since it only needs a JVM.

I started using it after getting frustrated with Gitlab's install process on RHEL (a year ago), and I used Gitolite before that. Gitblit has been refreshingly simple to deal with. Am I missing something other than the standard JVM hate?

icefox 11 years ago | |

I see a lovely list of all sorts of features, but then I get to limitations: "Built-in access controls are not branch-based, they are repository-based."

That falls under one of the three things that the Git solution must have or else I will just pass and find something else. http://benjamin-meyer.blogspot.com/2014/10/so-you-want-to-bu...

alex_hitchins 11 years ago | |

I haven't seen Gitblit before - thanks for the mention. I will check it out and see if it offers me any wins over GitLab.

solutionyogi 11 years ago |

Why are they not dogfooding?

If they will use Github to develop Gogs, the potential audience may think why they should not use Github itself.

I am not trying to put them down, it's very difficult to dog food when your product is in its early state but their page suggests that they already support Issue Tracking. I think it is in a state where they can use Gogs to develop Gogs. This will ensure that they work on those items which affects developers the most.

maaaats 11 years ago | |

To be fair, Gogs is about having your own, possibly private to a company, Git service. Github is about collaboration. Most people wanting to contribute to this are probably already on Github.

lsaferite 11 years ago | |

If a primary stated goal is self-hosting private repositories, why would you expect them to self-host?

Especially when it's an open-source project and GitHub is a large nexus of OSS development.

delinka 11 years ago | | |

I expect dog-fooding by people making tools for other people. There is no reason they can't self-host (without publishing the interface to the entire 'net) and then just use GitHub as another remote to handle external collaboration.

maratd 11 years ago | |

> If they will use Github to develop Gogs, the potential audience may think why should I not use Github itself?

Because you have to pay for private repos and pay even more to host your own deployment?

duiker101 11 years ago | | |

also, they might be using github because it's already open to the wide audience that might want to contribute.

swah 11 years ago | |

Tried the product again (w/ no repos..) and it looks very nice. Dogfooding, drop the "written in Go" like technomancy says, big-ass buttons "Import from my Github" and "Import from existing repository".

This should be more popular!

thawkins 11 years ago | | |

Written in GO is important for us as we have inhouse GO skills, we dont have ruby skills. This tool would be perfect for us, if it had AD/LDAP integration. Being written in GO means we can consider doing it ourselves.

dewey 11 years ago | |

They don't support issue tracking yet. Not really something you'd want for the development process.

Vendan 11 years ago |

Just as a warning, I don't consider gogs to be stable enough for production use. There's data race errors that pop up, resulting in errors resolving various assets. I've had everything from user's avatar icons to the main homepage randomly error out as 404. The dev doesn't seem to understand that data races, i.e. unsafe cross thread data access, is an issue. In addition, note that it and least some of the libraries it uses are written by devs for whom english is at best a second language, so expect difficulties communicating. Finally, a lot of the paradigms it uses are considered un-idiomatic by the golang community at large, so don't expect assistance from the community(for instance, dependency injection and reflection powered "magic").

mholt 11 years ago | |

> note that it and least some of the libraries it uses are written by devs for whom english is at best a second language, so expect difficulties communicating

Considering that English is not their native language, I'd say they're doing pretty darn well so far. Speaking with at least one of the developers personally and via email, I've never had any trouble.

> don't expect assistance from the community

Well that's a mighty presumptuous thing to say about a lot of good people. By and large, the Go community likes Gogs and its developers. I've met Jiahua personally. He's a solid guy and one really dedicated developer. Overall, the Go community wants Gogs to be great.

If you don't like Gogs, you don't have to use it. But you're raising a warning about it because you think the Go community treats it like some sort of poison and that the developers are incompetent. Neither are true.

Vendan 11 years ago | | |

I tried to get the developer to fix my issue, or even consider it as an issue, but got no where.

I'll admit, I don't speak for the community as a whole, but about every go developer I've spoken to has the same feeling I do, and it's echoed all over the web. Macaron, the central framework, is inspired by, and rather heavily follows, the style of Martini. It's dependency injection and runtime reflection code style is considered highly unsafe. But don't take my word for it, maybe you'll listen to the author of Martini? http://codegangsta.io/blog/2014/05/19/my-thoughts-on-martini... Or the post it's in response to? https://stephensearles.com/three-reasons-you-should-not-use-...

awalGarg 11 years ago |

I explored it heavily for the last 2 minutes on my Ubuntu 14.04 fresh VM.

- Installation (and liberty to chose between 3 database engines) couldn't be easier. No Gitlab's omnibus package doesn't come even close.

- Gogs does support issues. Proper Github like issues with labels, milestones, assignees, markdown etc.

- There are no pull requests. And you can't edit files from the web interface. I bet Linus Torvalds will love it and ask Github to shutdown in favor of Gogs.

- The interface is pretty much the same as Github, so ++ there too.

- Sending commit messages like "do something, fixes #3" won't close #3.

- You cannot code review, comment on diffs, or commits. This one hurts me.

- Is too much fast and less resource intensive compared to Gitlab, so ++ if you are resource limited.

I would recommend to run locally for small personal projects. OR if you just want a web interface to git, and not a browser based version control system.

adsche 11 years ago |

Just downloaded the current linux binary package. Unfortunately, installing is not yet as easy as unzipping the archive as the article claims.

It contained some __MACOSX, ._* and .DS_Store files. They don't disturb anything but thats just careless packaging.

The executable bit on the executable was not set.

The config file suggests fo generating keys:

    ; Generate steps:
    ; $ cd path/to/gogs/custom/https
    ; $ ./gogs cert -ca=true -duration=8760h0m0s -host=myhost.example.com

The path to the binary here has to be ../../gogs and the mentioned directory has to be created.

Once it's up and running, I do like it so far for my personal repositories.

izacus 11 years ago |

I use Gogs on my Synology NAS for personal use and I love it. Mostly because it's so easy to setup and deploy - cross-compiling the binary for ARM was simple, after that it was just a matter of SCPing it to the NAS itself.

It's not as feature rich as other options, but it does it's job well.

dordoka 11 years ago | |

Care to share how did you get it working on Synology? Thanks very much.

izacus 11 years ago | | |

Uhm, basically I built it on my mac with

GOOS=linux GOARCH=arm GOARM=7 go build

See http://dave.cheney.net/2012/09/08/an-introduction-to-cross-c... for cross compilation instructions.

Then I created a new user, scpd the distribution and added gogs binary to rc.local. I also installed git from the Synology package manager. There was some tweaking involved, but that was mostly it.

fab13n 11 years ago | |

I would be interested by a more in-depth how-to too.

dordoka 11 years ago | | |

Synology has also just announced Docker support on DSM 5.2 beta [1], so we could also run Gogs as a docker image :)

[1] https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/5.2beta/productivity

Touche 11 years ago |

There's also Gitbucket which has as similar advantage: https://github.com/takezoe/gitbucket

neumann 11 years ago | |

I found gitbucket after trying (unsuccessfully) to run gitlab on my 512mb RAM VM.

It has satisfied all the needs of our small group, which is essentially keeping a visual track of our git repos and permissions.

bau5 11 years ago | | |

You probably just needed more swap. If you already had 1.5GB, maybe try it with 2GB. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9212476

subliminalpanda 11 years ago | |

+1, Gitbucket is quite nice.

stevekemp 11 years ago | | |

Deployment is trivial, and it is very stable.

Gitbucket is what I recommend.

Rafert 11 years ago |

What experiences do people have with http://phabricator.org/ ? It's not a GitHub clone but it does seem very complete, possibly replacing Jira and Stash if you're into the Atlassian ecosystem.

jumpwah 11 years ago |

I know this is on the front page of https://gogs.io, and also that gogs is made to be self hosted, but have a look at https://notabug.org as a website to host git repositories which runs its own version of gogs.

I am not affiliated with the project.

julianz 11 years ago | |

https://gogs.io/ seems to be a completely different site from http://gogs.io/, and has the wrong certificate as well.

jumpwah 11 years ago | | |

My bad! Accidently just assumed https.

andmarios 11 years ago |

Gogs is great for one-person or small team setups. I switched to it from gitbucket, which is also great and I do recommend it. It was the memory footprint (Go binary vs JVM) that made the choice easy for me.

The functionality I miss the most is search. I think it may be easy to implement some basic form of search using git grep.

liotier 11 years ago | |

  > The functionality I miss the most is search.
  > it may be easy to implement some basic form of search using git grep.

Or maybe have Gogs integrate The Platinum Searcher - a code search tool similar to ack, written in Golang: https://github.com/monochromegane/the_platinum_searcher

hmottestad 11 years ago |

We run Gitlab at work.

It's a bit slower than Stash, but other than that I really love it. Lots of features, and they are easy to use. Upgrading to the newest version has always been simple.

Only gotcha we have had is the timeout of the workers, which meant that some large repositories would be impossible to clone. After adjusting the timeout everything was fine. Although a bit more caching would be in order to speed up clones.

akfanta 11 years ago | |

"a bit slower"? My experience with Gitlab was terrible. It's unbearably slow especially when I try to create a relatively large pull request for review. The pull request comparison tool is not very smart either. Often times I have a big chunk of false change detection.

Maybe I was doing it wrong, but I just don't see any advantage of it over the like of Github and Bitbucket.

pwelch 11 years ago | | |

Self hosting is a big plus for Gitlab.

I've used it at a few places and had nothing but a good experience. Upgrades are easy and it's easy on boarding people who are used to Github.

I would recommend giving Gitlab another try...

hmottestad 11 years ago | | |

The advantage is that it's free to host it yourself.

Github enterprise is super expensive.

And Stash (the self hosted equivalent of Bitbucket) is also fairly expensive once you go over 10 users.

lsllc 11 years ago | | |

Gitlab has gotten much faster in recent releases.

vhost- 11 years ago |

I like this a lot. Gitlab was hard to get running for me on Debian. Plus it was a rails project so it always takes 10 seconds to start up.

This was pretty quick. As a Go person myself, I love the single binary way.

ceejayoz 11 years ago |

> You could certainly purchase access to private Github repositories, but most certainly you’d rather want to invest your capital in more pressing matters.

Getting a few private repositories on GH is $7/month.

It'll cost me more than that for a server, not to mention the time setting up and managing.

bau5 11 years ago | |

Unlike GitLab, gogs can probably run well on a $5 DigitalOcean instance.

awalGarg 11 years ago | | |

Can confirm. Running Gitlab on the $5 (or even $10) Digital Ocean VM is not gonna give you optimal experience unless you are a single user with a tiny repository and dedicate the entire VM to Gitlab (even after that, it is pretty slow on the $5 instance).

Haven't tried Gogs yet but sounds like it would be faster.

DouweM 11 years ago | | |

Digital Ocean recommends running GitLab on their $10/month instance, so while I haven't tried it, the $5 one is probably still up to the task: https://www.digitalocean.com/features/one-click-apps/gitlab/

(Full disclosure: I'm a developer at GitLab B.V.)

ceejayoz 11 years ago | | |

Leaving me with an entire annual savings of $24 over Github.

I should probably set up SSL, backups, patch it occasionally, etc., which is going to pretty quickly eat that up.

jonalmeida 11 years ago | |

I've got Gitlab running on a DigitalOcean droplet, and even if you choose not to use their pre-built images, setting up Gitlab is very easy.

markthethomas 11 years ago |

Is it just me, or does it bother anyone that the design seems SO ripped from Github? Github's UI has a lot to be said for it and perhaps emulation is more of a compliment here, but...even the icon font glyphs...

jordigh 11 years ago | |

Look-and-feel is famously not copyrightable in the US, and there's a familiar interface brings a lot of benefit to the user.

So, no, it does not bother me. :-)

markthethomas 11 years ago | | |

Totally valid -- I guess I just like to see projects that try something new out, develop their own design, or at least put their own spin on something. Just a personal preference, really.

chrisdotcode 11 years ago | |

They are literally using Github's icons set.

https://octicons.github.com/

davefp 11 years ago | | |

Looks like the font itself is OFL and any code is MIT, so reuse is perfectly reasonable.

https://github.com/github/octicons/blob/master/LICENSE.txt

alexcason 11 years ago |

At what point does it become a concern when you're just ripping off the UI of a competing product?

doughj3 11 years ago | |

Something something good artists, great artists?

Personally I feel for pieces of software like this it's fair to more or less clone the user interface. There's a lot of effort built up in understanding how to use this tool. Think of the complaints LibreOffice gets for not looking enough like Word, or GIMP for not looking enough like Photoshop.

Plus, Gitlab is already open source, so can you really call it "ripping off"? If you're referring moreso to Github, then I think Gitlab did it first and Gogs is following that trend. I'm sure both projects improve on UI where they feel best.

treve 11 years ago | | |

It's one thing to offer the same UI elements and experience, it's another thing to make it look identical in colors, spacing, fonts, icons, etc... They took it quite far imho.

Ygg2 11 years ago | |

Isn't GitLab doing the same thing?

one-more-minute 11 years ago | | |

GitLab could definitely have been a bit more original with the name, but actually the UI is very different from GitHub. Which has its pros and cons, of course.

technomancy 11 years ago |

Maybe it isn't fair, but every time I see "...written in X" tacked on the end of the tag line, I assume it's a very immature product. If the implementation language is that high on the list of things potential users might be interested in, it's usually a sign that they've got a ways to go.

tracker1 11 years ago |

It really bugs me that more people forget that you can use git+ssh on any shared server, if you don't have the Pull-Request/review support, why bother with more?

That said, the project is pretty cool.. it just bugs me a little that people always reach for a full product for small teams with private git needs.

ctvo 11 years ago |

What's the value of hosting your own Github alternative as an organization / company? Do people have on-premise requirements and don't want to pay for Github enterprise? I assume most start-ups don't and 25 USD for 10 private repositories isn't going to break the bank.

orthecreedence 11 years ago |

Does Gogs support webhook integrations (ie, someone pushed to this repo, notify our team on slack)?

I'm interested in Gogs because gitlab seems to have trouble servicing multiple requests, like when deploying to four servers and they all try to pull code at once (three of them fail). We could have just misconfigured something, but it's hard to imagine there's a config option for "fall over on concurrent requests."

sytse 11 years ago | |

I'm sorry to hear that GitLab didn't seem to work with multiple requests. The way to resolve this is to configure multiple unicorn workers, please see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab/blob/master/doc...

On GitLab.com we have 20+ unicorn workers that handle over 30k monthly active users.

orthecreedence 11 years ago | | |

Cool, thanks for reaching out! I'll look into this. Finding info about this problem was a chore, so I'm really appreciative you're able to point me somewhere =].

codewithcheese 11 years ago |

"But what if you’re writing some Android app, maybe you’re building the next great iOS game or in general, you’re writing some code that you don’t want to be exposed to the general public ?

You could certainly purchase access to private Github repositories, but most certainly you’d rather want to invest your capital in more pressing matters."

... BitBucket!

maaaats 11 years ago | |

Yeah, the reasoning is not completely sound. I think a better argument to use Gogs would be the fact that your code is self-hosted with the implications of privacy that brings.

one-more-minute 11 years ago |

I just downloaded this to try it out and it really is insanely easy to get going. Just unzip and `./gogs web`, done. It's also clear what settings and data are getting stored where, so moving / upgrading / removing looks easy.

That in itself is pretty compelling, even if it's clearly not as mature as the competition yet.

somesay 11 years ago |

> Also, since Google Code hosting project is closing down, you can expect more projects being driven to it.

Well, Google Code was never used for private repositories, so that argument is irrelevant for the intended free private repository introduction.

alkonaut 11 years ago |

Still looking for a good locally deployable github alternative that has decent issue tracker (i.e. youtrack/jira/tfs level of customization and planinng support) AND pull request support. Are there any? Is this it?

FeloniousHam 11 years ago | |

I have found Gitblit Go (http://gitblit.com) to be the easiest to setup and maintain (upgrading is just unzipping).

It's dead simple, and I haven't had any issues in almost two years (though my needs are small, just supporting a small team with very low volume).

mikewhy 11 years ago | |

I haven't used it before, but Gitlab does offer JIRA integration[1][2]

[1]: http://doc.gitlab.com/ee/integration/jira.html

[2]: http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/integration/external-issue-tracker....

rpcope1 11 years ago | |

Phabricator has really good issue tracking baked in and supports a workflow that is esssential Github style pull requests.

icefox 11 years ago | |

Why not just install a separate product that is dedicated to being a really good issue tracker?

yourapostasy 11 years ago | | |

I was introduced to the concept of integrated defect and issue tracking inside a source control system by IBM CMVC [1]. I'm certain there are even earlier tools that implemented this concept.

If you have a large, distributed team, say more than a couple dozen developers, then a tightly-interwoven defect and issue tracker that disrupts the workflow of the developers as little as possible enables some support organization models that are otherwise very unwieldy. Even with just plain text defect and issue fields, it was pretty remarkable how much sideband material via email was avoided.

Most of the satisfaction with this tooling depended upon (as usual) how management dictated it be used. Developers who had to use these features didn't universally love it though, even with developer-savvy/friendly management. Generally, modulo adverse management interference, if you did a lot of maintenance work on a code base, I can reasonably predict that you would tend to either like the integration, benignly tolerate it, or come to like it; it did save a lot of time, especially for those who automated parts of the related workflow.

This stemmed from being able to start with an issue that simply described the support ticket, evolve it to a defect that identified change sets that encompassed the suspected cause, check out, branch, check in code only related to the specific defect, including ancillary/utility/harness/test code specific to just the defect. It made it easier to "break off" a chunk of code for a specific defect, if someone put in the work to identify those pieces of code and properly used the integrated defect/issue features.

I personally like this kind of integration, and furthermore want regression testing support tied into it, but that's only because I'm really lazy and my memory leaks like a sieve, so getting back into the zone for a specific issue I worked on even only N weeks/months ago, locating all the relevant chunks of code needed, is terribly tedious for me.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Configuration_Management_Ve...

FeloniousHam 11 years ago | | |

In the "enterprise", my experience is that incentives/expertise fight hard against successful integrations of 'best of breed' products. In large organizations, features for developers are (at least minor) headaches for the build team, so they don't get rolled out.

Github has raised the bar on what to expect from an integrated SCM, and others have followed suit, so I don't much value added by specialist vendors. I kind of think of it like car radios; you used to have to replace the factory system with a third party product, now almost no one does. The deck that comes with the car is plenty good enough, plus it has the integration with the steering wheel, etc.

Sami_Lehtinen 11 years ago |

One of the reasons I'm using Bitbucket vs GitHub is that Bitbucket allows free private repositories. Yay, but I love Cogs. Easy to install self hosted version. Sounds perfect for just so many purposes.

zoomix 11 years ago |

That's weird. I'd have thought that "difficult to manage/install/update" is a used-to-be problem now that docker's around..

IE6 11 years ago |

I've used gogs because of it being mentioned here before however I'd love to see an analysis of the stability of these various git front ends.

enlightenedfool 11 years ago |

Can anyone comment on the T&C on ownership of repo content on these Git hosts? I could not locate specific mention of that on Gitlab.

JonathonW 11 years ago | |

Gitlab's terms and conditions for their hosted service are here; they don't really address ownership: https://about.gitlab.com/terms/

Gogs isn't a hosted service; you're installing it on servers you control, so you retain ownership of your content. (I suppose there would be questions about ownership if you uploaded content to their demo instance at try.gogs.io, but you probably shouldn't upload things you care about to a demo server like that.)

amree 11 years ago |

Should've include Redmine in the list too

vallard 11 years ago |

seems like with docker to install gitlab now the argument for ease of deployment doesn't matter as much anymore.

sytse 11 years ago | |

Thanks! And if you don't want to use Docker you can use the Omnibus packages of GitLab to install in 2 minutes.

fsniper 11 years ago | | |

sytse: I think installation is not the issue with gitlab. It's rails ecosystem. It's slow, hard to manage and composed of magic. I'm currently using gitlab, promoting it. But this does not mean, I won't leave it at a whim if some contender without rails comes through.

le_lenny_face 11 years ago |

Anything to discourage a GitHub monoculture is a good thing, IMO.

lugg 11 years ago |

Found an easier to use docker setup [1]. Took around 5 minutes after downloads to setup in a docker-machine vm on a mac. Quite nice little gui, just make sure you change localhost and port to the correct docker vm ip (or hostname if you're on a droplet or something)

Only commenting because I found their docker setup to be far overcomplicated (uses fig and I couldn't be bothered figuring out what I needed / didn't)

[1] https://github.com/codeskyblue/docker-gogs

yAnonymous 11 years ago |

GitLab is doing a good job here, but it's great to see there are many good alternatives in the git world.

eugeneionesco 11 years ago |

Is this better than Phabricator?

http://phabricator.org/