Experiences with self-hosted git servers

[Grzegorz Junka]

On 04/02/2020 14:37, Ed Maste wrote:
> A remaining task for the Git Working Group is to evaluate and make a
> recommendation for repository hosting. Both self-hosted and third
> party services may be examined.
>
> There are a number of options for self-hosting, such as Gitea, GitLab,
> as well as git's plain built-in server. Phabricator (which we use for
> code reviews) also includes a repository hosting module named
> Diffusion.
>
> I am interested in hearing from FreeBSD users and developers who have
> used one or more of these, or other Git hosting tools - what worked
> well, what didn't? What do you wish you had known before getting
> started?


I have used Github, Gitlab and Bitbucket at various occasions. All 
comments below are my opinions.

The only advantage Github has is the community, i.e. almost everyone has 
a Github account and knows how to fork and contribute patches. Main 
disadvantages are that there are very few tools to work with the 
repository and those available are suboptimal. By that I mean things 
like viewing or searching commit history, doing code reviews, viewing 
graphs of branches, comparing specific branches or commits, etc.

Bitbucket has the best tools for code reviews, merges, viewing and 
comparing history, etc. It also has a great policy enforcement system 
and a plugin ecosystem. Project admins can, for example, set up rules 
how many compulsory and optional reviewers have to review and approve a 
pull request before it can be merged. The plugins allow integrating with 
CI and defect tracking, e.g. to start a CI job when a PR is merged. The 
disadvantage is that many of those tools rely or work best with other 
Atlassian products, like Jira or Bamboo. Which of course doesn't mean 
they can't work with other tools - we had a Bitbucket set up to work 
with TeamCity and Jenkins.

Gitlab is much better than Github but not as good as Bitbucket. It's 
more difficult to configure and lacks rules similar to Bitbucket. 
However, it still has better tools for code reviews, and comparing and 
browsing history than Github.

One last note is that I have used those tools in a corporate 
environment. Open source community might or might not have different 
requirements and evaluation criteria.

GrzegorzJ