It looks like a new service has entered the project hosting market – Project Locker. Its already crowded with 10 major SVN hosts but this one looks promising. It provides Git, SVN version control and Trac hosting too. The level of integration with other services seems quite impressive too.
Their pricing model seems quite reasonable and as is customary they offer free accounts of 2 users and 300Mb storage. This gives you the option to produce as many repos as you want! How many repos this will give you I’m not sure but its a good start.
Archive for the ‘subversion’ Category
Project Locker Project Hosting
March 1st, 2009…but Mercurial is even better
May 10th, 2008
I posted the other week about how great Git is – It took a while for me to get the point. I’m generally the last to figure this stuff out so forgive me if I’m preaching to the converted. For anyone still unconvinced this video presentation by Linus about Git helped a lot. It was the point at which he said: “no politics, no access rights”. Sweet, sweet freedom. It suddenly dawned on me how simple and easy it’s been to manage my Git repos.
This was again compounded when I had to implement a patch in my Asterisk PHP API which is Subversion hosted. As the current version was out of date the patch failed so needed to be done manually. If on the other hand we’d been using Git or Mercurial I could simply Pull the contributors changes. Nice and simple! No fuss, no bother, just get on with it.
So now to the point of my post: Mercurial.
Now Git was great but I think I’ve found a new friend in Mercurial. Although Mercurial is still lacking in some areas (named branches still can’t be deleted nicely) I think it’s future is much brighter. For starters its ported to more platforms. This is an advantage gleaned form it being developed in Python. Which is my major point here – being in Python makes it nicer, easier and cleaner to deal with. Writing extensions to Hg is a snap with a nice built-in API. So its immaturity in features is more than made up for its potential.
It has all the advantages of Gits distributed methodology but with the flexibility to grow beyond its existing state easily and rapidly.
Free Mercurial Hosting
Git – Sold
April 27th, 2008I’ve posted a few times about my lack of enthusiasm for Git and other distributed version control systems (DVCS). I never thought there was any point in it unless you were part of a large-scale and very geo-diverse set of developers. When its just a project with me and maybe a few others it seems pointless.
However, I did promise I’d give Git a go.
Verdict? My god! How could I have been so naive! I feel like I’ve unshackled myself. Here’s why:
Tagging and Branching – In the past I never bothered with Subversions branching and tagging. It seemed clunky and I saw little point in all honesty. Linus said he believed one of the major reasons people didn’t bother with branching much was for precisely that reason. Now using Git branching is immensely easy! It suddenyl makes sense to use it and flitting and flying around my source is a snap.
Speed - This is a killer. Git flies! It really does bloody fly like the wind. Its locally hosted but even so I’ve not come across another source control system with this speed.
Intuitive - Ignoring files and removing files form your repo are simple processes. I always found doing this in Subversion to be sketchy at best. Most of Gits commands are very simple and easy to deal with with nice clean output.
I’ve currently got two Django projects on the go and one is using Subversion, the other Git. I’m seriously considering scrapping svn entirely and switching to Git. I’ve got another Django project on the horizon that I’ll give Hg a try with.
10 Free SVN & Project Hosting Services
September 20th, 2007
UPDATED: As of Jul 10th 2009
Open Source seems to be exploding all over the place at the moment and with online services increasingly jumping on the free offerings its been fantastic for developers wanting to host, manage, flaunt and communicate their projects online. Here’s a rundown of 6 free SVN hosting and project management offerings I like the look of.
Unfuddle
Nice name and nice site. Very web 2.0 and slick with project tracking such as issue tickets, source control, time tracking, milestones, etc. The free package only comes with 200Mb and restrictive user allowances (1 per account) and only one project. This makes them the stingiest of the group. This is reflected in their price-resources on paid plans with $99 only getting you 10Gb and 50 projects. Compare this to $59.99 at Codespaces for the same space but unlimited projects.
Pros: best interface, great features, Git support.
Cons: high price, low resources, tiny free account.
CodeSpaces
They have a hefty 500Mb for 2 free users per account and they have a good range of prices starting from $9 per month for 4-man teams upto $59 for unlimited.
Pros: nice interface, good pricing, active and involved developers.
Cons: Not as many features as the ‘big-beast’ Assembla.
Assembla
Part of a large and feature-packed service full of project management features as well as basic 200Mb of SVN hosting. It even has a jobs board but the project hosting comes with wiki pages, blogs, etc. The free package has all of this but lacks phone supports and is only for open source projects. They have VERY competitive prices starting from $3.
Pros: packed with features, reliable, supports Mercurial.
Cons: pricey in the higher plans.
OpenSVN
One of the first to release free SVN hosting and starting to show its age with very barebones features. They had a major failure in backup and restore last year which causes some worry about their reliability. So when I say “free SVN hosting” I really mean just that!
Pros: unlimited space, unlimited projects.
Cons: very unreliable, no features!
XP-Dev
This is a very no-frills setup but they have one killer feature: Private SVN repo hosting – FOR FREE!! Made for agile and extreme programmers this doesn’t have a lot of the features inherent in other services but thats just fine. Its also got an unlimited repo limit.
Pros: unlimited repos, free private hosting
Cons: Only one paid option, very few features.
Bounty Source
Still going strong after I first mentioned it back in June Bounty Source offer your basic SVN along with a wiki and CMS for managing your projects online presence as well as a task tracker. Bounty Source have a unique feature though that enables a developer to be paid for the work they carry out on user feature requests. Something I really like the look of – all I need now is an open source project people are going to pay me to finish!
Pros: bounty system helps devs get paid to work.
Cons: no paid option, looking old, falling behind in features.
SourceForge
Like an old grandfather clock this has been around years and although very reliable its showing its age. They tried to spruce it up with some Web2.0 gradients and curves but you can’t scrub out the moldy smell from that interface and features-set.
Pros: reliable, well established.
Cons: very intrusive ads, pain to use.
Google Project Hosting
They seem to have taken a lot of the old school methods of project hosting from SourceForge. Unfortunately as mentioned earlier they’re looking old and although Google looks much cleaner its features still lack the richness that the smaller providers have who’ve gone all out on innovation while Google remains formulaic. Google also don’t provide paid private hosting. Its all open source here.
Pros: reliable, clean interface, good features, supports mercurial
Cons: no private paid options, open source only
Comparison Table – Free Accounts
| Metric | Unfuddle | Code Spaces | OpenSVN | Bounty Source | XP-Dev | SourceForge | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Project/Repo | 1/Unlimited[1] | Unlimited/Unlimited | 1 | Unlimited | 5 | Unlimited[4] | Unlimited |
| Space | 200Mb | 50Mb | Unlimited | N/A[3] | 300Mb | Unlimited[4] | Unlimited |
| Wiki | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Tracking | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Browser | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
- [1] Unfuddle allow one active project but unlimited numbers of repos within it.
- [3] They state nowhere on their site about limits to project size.
- [4] Google claim in their terms that there’s no upper limit but they reserve the right to impose one.
Free SVN Hosting
June 8th, 2007This post has since been superseded but this one which lists 6 free SVN hosting services.
Stop Press!!! There have been others in the past who’ve offered free SVN hosting of your source but nothing this slick and professional with the feature set available – Bounty Source. If you haven’t got your own Linux/Unix server hooked up somewhere from which you can remotely access your SVN repositories then this will be a superb resource.
- Task Tracker
- Content Management System
- Library for holding resources
- File Hosting
- SVN Hosting
- Bounties
That last one is an interesting idea and I’ll let them explain:
Bounties — All tasks (Feature Request / Bug Report) accept Bounties (monetary rewards) to increase developer incentive.
All these features are also packed into a snazzy Ajax interface!
