Goodbye Github

A good version control system is critical to any software development project. I haven’t been serious enough in the field to have ever messed with Subversion, but git has been part of my daily workflow for a while now. Github has been instrumental for the advancement of open source software, and there are still tons of projects out there that are still relying on it, and I’ll continue using it as far as I need to in order to participating in those projects. But moving forward, I’m using GitLab for all my new projects, and will be recommending it moving forward.

I’ll admit that I’m a cheapskate, and have never shelled out the $7/month to enable private repos on GitHub. And then Microsoft bought them. I haven’t noticed any changes as a result of that buyout, so I can’t say that there’s anything that troubles me. I understand the ban on embargoed countries that they had to implement, but that bothers me from an imperialist standpoint than anything I hold GitHub responsible for. Their hands are tied.

I attempted to setup local git servers on some my local and hosted servers, but nothing beats the convenience of software as a service. However, when I started pitching what would hopefully be a commercial project, I wasn’t about to put things up in a public repo. I had originally started using Bitbucket as an alternative, but recent experiences with other people who have used it previously have been problematic. (Issues following their buyout by Atlassian left many users unable to access their team accounts…)

My university is currently running an (older) version of GitLab internally, and I’ve been working with it extensively today as part of a new group project that I’m working on. One of the things we’re doing is setting up project repos for our website, and eventually other deliverables that we’ll be generating as part of the course. I wanted to avoid using Google drive, so I set something up to push our repo to the computer science department web servers. Unfortunately, they’re running a newer version of Kubernetes which is preventing the continuous integration runner from working, so we’re pretty much stuck for now. But it’s got me looking at options for static content management pages, which is cool. The idea is to allow people to easily edit the repo pages using markdown, and then have Jekyll or whatever package push the generated HTML to the project site. Today has mostly been about setting up scheduling tools and a Discord instance.

But hopping back to the public Gitlab site, I’ve been pretty impressed with the functionality of things like GitLab Pages and the features built into the service. So for now, GitLab will be my go-to for all new code repos.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *