It's definitely not trying to be a GitHub competitor. They love GitHub and just want a way for people to store stuff on their own servers as well. I actually use this and have a hook on my GitLab server to push all recieves to GitHub. Distributed VCS are awesome and I'll never lose my code with this method.
Does GitLab/GitHub use git objects to store the issues file? If not, then using this software does in fact significantly increase your likeliness to lose data, since your single server will crash and you only had a local copy of your source code, not your issues.
[edit] I just checked: GitLab stores issues in a database separate from git, therefore unless you have a solid backup plan for those, it will significantly increase the likelihood of you losing data. GitHub stores wiki pages at least as git objects, so when you clone your repository, you have a full backup of all of those.
So, it's just like GitHub except GitHub has wiki's that are stored as Git objects. Or are you saying that GitHub also stores issues in git? I don't understand how this is an argument against GitLab.
GitLab doesn't include support for wiki pages (or I couldn't find it). Comparing apples to apples, I'm focusing on the issue tracker databases. I don't know where GitHub stores this kind of data.
If your team uses GitHub, you're paying a company to reliably store your data, and that's all the company does, and so I'm sure they have RAID0, plus backup drives, plus tape backups. If your team uses GitLab, you're hosting it yourself, so you are responsible for having reliable storage and backups. Obviously, it's infeasible for a tiny startup to have the same level of reliability that GitHub has.
palish's argument is that losing data is unlikely in either scenario. It's true that it's incredibly unlikely for both, but it's far more likely to happen if you roll your own solution. (It's incredibly unlikely that two values hash to one MD5. It's far less likely that two values hash to one SHA1. Either case is very unlikely, but SHA1 is magnitudes better.)
Oh, I thought that might have been your point. I think my point is that it's easy to trivially and even privately replicate git repos to backups.
If you trust only local + gitlab, I would agree, you at are a higher risk than local + github. The point is, gitlab can be every bit as open and accessible as github, as to make it easy to have another account mirror your git repos. GitHub + free BitBucket private repos = cheap + reliable + redundant repos.
I can now have a local gitlab resource that I keep synced with repos in github, almost trivially. bliss
For git data. You also want to backup your mysql database, otherwise all your issue tracker data is stored only in one place. (This is my point, I am apparently unable to properly express it.)
It's not that hard. Just make a script to do regular backups to S3. Cheap and easy. Hell, just run the whole thing on Amazon. Unlimited private repos, reliable uptime & backup, and cheap storage.
Although it isn't competing with Github's online offerings. I think it would be nice if they both hosted and ran GitLabHQ using their own software. That would be the perfect demo IMO.
Or really, for cgit/gitweb/gitorious. There's really no lack of acceptable web front ends for git hosting. Github is prettier and better than those solutions, and I use it. But it's really just incrementally better; simple command line access is 80% of what you need. If this is better than what's available, I'm all for it. But I'm not sure I'd call it particularly innovative.
There's just something about an application that not only performs well, but also doesn't look like a Geocities homepage sprinkled with sendmail.cf, that makes me smile.
I'm not sure how that makes it not a replacement. Arguably 'externally hosted' is a single feature (or serious drawback) of github, not the defining attribute of their product.
It's also a limitation you can get around by paying them more money, but that doesn't make this position that Gitlab is not competing with github seem any less arbitrary.
I setup Gitorious for the company that I used to work for, but it did not allow for fine-grained control of access permissions. (Everything is public for members.)
For what it's worth, we were both wrong and about the same thing. GitLab is powered by Gitosis, rather than Gitolite, though it appears that may be changing. Gitorious is powered by it's own solution I think and is comparable to GitLab/GitHub.
Doesn't make sense to open source a Github clone or doesn't make sense to host the code on Github?
If the answer were the former, I'd have to say that many a team use Git internally without being able to host it on a third party service and would benefit from a simple UI to make things easier. If the answer was the later, I'd have to say that any code you intend to share with the community should be hosted on Github and Github only.
Been using gitweb with a custom theme by some dude (https://github.com/kogakure/gitweb-theme). This seems much cleaner and easy to use. When I have some time I'll probably switch over to this if it doesn't have any problems/bugs
I like paying for github. They are an important service to me - for open source and private projects, and I want a profitable business to be based on it. I like that they have skin in the game.
Our company gives them money but the main thing is that we have a lot of small private projects that are more like prototypes and will never see the light of day. We are not permitted to open source them and probably wouldn't if we could because they'd be worthless to everyone but us. The pricing plans for additional private repos is pretty steep with github so we had to pay for a crappy repository hosting service to dump all of our second tier projects. GitLab would be pretty neat to allow us to store our second rate stuff on our own servers and the stuff we use every day on github.
Why not use bitbucket.org instead if you have a bunch of small private repositories? They allow for unlimited private repositories, and it has been working quite well for me.
So they re-opened that offer? When they closed it I had to endure about six dire e-mails when all I wanted to say was screw you, I've already re-hosted my stuff.
Except github's plans screw companies that have a lot of projects. At my last full time job we had 20-40+ projects at once. The public plans only go up to 20 repos. Most were microsites coming in under 2MB space.
Thanks for proving this, now I don't have to buy the paid githib repos :) I can use this for free for my own projects (private) and the UI is awesome. One of the best open source projects, how long did it took you all to build this?
Quite exciting, given what a rainy hill climb gitorious is and the lack of much else.
But: Gitosis?
Unless it's back from the dead, its development has long been abandoned. It works just fine, but the new kid on the block is Gitolite, and it makes far more sense.
Looks great but will it be a pain to use GitHub and GitLab for different projects? I'm not too experienced with Git so I'm hopiing that configuring my machines to connect to GitLab won't screw up what I have with GitHub.
[1] - http://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq