Gitblit: Stories from the Field

Continuing my little tribute to the Gitblit 1.0 release, I asked some old colleagues of mine, Leif and Trygve, about their experiences with using Gitblit in practice.

Q: How do you use Gitblit?

Leif:
Webstep is a consultancy company, and we needed a Git repository for a specific client project that is being run in-house.

At the moment the Gitblit server hosts three different projects, but only one is in active development.

Trygve:
I was working as a consultant in a team that was currently using Subversion, but wanted to switch to Git. IT were working on an installation of Gitorious, but the project didn't have a very high priority.

As an intermediate solution I looked around for small, simple solutions for hosting a low number of repositories (around 10). As it was only our team that was going to use it, we didn't have any need for complicated security setups, just plain hosting. Having a web interface was a big plus as I wanted to show it was easy to create lots of small projects, instead of those big lumps we ended up with in Subversion. The team was also going to split their one big web app into two smaller apps.

We use Gitblit as a central Git server for our team. Later on other teams that wanted to try out Git started to use it as well.

Q: Any other products you were considering? Why did you pick Gitblit over them?

Leif:
Our server infrastructure is Microsoft based, and we needed a solution that was easy to install and maintain.

Keeping costs low is important to us and our clients, so a for-pay solution was really never in the picture.

Off-site hosting like Github, Bitbucket and Assembla is problematic for most client projects in a number of ways, so that was really not an option either.

I had a look at the managed server and local install option of Gitorious, but they were too expensive for our simple needs.

So I tried a "manual" install of a barebones Git server, but found it non-trivial on the Windows server. Gitblit took care of that in a matter of minutes, and I haven't looked back ever since.

Trygve:
- Gitorious (too complicated to set up)
- Just use an account at Github - not allowed by IT
- Custom scripts + gitweb - too much work, at least when Gitblit was so easy

Q: Anything you particularly like or dislike about Gitblit?

Leif:
I like the simplicity of it. The webpage is nice and clean. Functionality is sufficient for our needs.
At the moment we are just two developers rebasing off each other, so we do not need more advanced functionality like pull requests.

When I first installed Gitblit Go, the windows service would die immediately after starting up. It turned out that one needs the 32-bit version, even if the server OS is 64 bit. Thats the only problem we've had so far.

Trygve:
Ease of use, definitely. Just click click and you're done. Sending links to diffs and stuff is also very useful. Having the dashboard to show an overview over what's happening is nice.

No dislikes in particular. I didn't try the advanced features, but as a small Git server, it's the shit.

I had to implement security integration with Crowd but that was easy enough. Took about 3-4 hours from start to end.

Q: Any final notes or comments about Gitblit you want to share?
Leif:
Gitblit has served us nicely so far, and I won't hesitate to recommend it if you need a no-fuss Windows-based Git server.

Big thanks to Trygve and Leif for doing the interviews!

Comments

Open source CMS evaluations

I have now seen three more or less serious open source CMS reviews. First guy to hit the field was Matt Raible ( 1 2 3 4 ), ending up with Drupal , Joomla , Magnolia , OpenCms and MeshCMS being runner-ups. Then there is OpenAdvantage that tries out a handful ( Drupal , Exponent CMS , Lenya , Mambo , and Silva ), including Plone which they use for their own site (funny/annoying that the entire site has no RSS-feeds, nor is it possible to comment on the articles), following Matt's approach by exluding many CMS that seem not to fit the criteria. It is somewhat strange that OpenAdvantage cuts away Magnolia because it "Requires J2EE server; difficult to install and configure; more of a framework than CMS", and proceed to include Apache Lenya in the full evaluation. Magnolia does not require a J2EE server. It runs on Tomcat just like Lenya does (maybe it's an idea to bundle Magnolia with Jetty to make it seem more lightweight). I'm still sure that OpenAdvant

Encrypting and Decrypting with Spring

I was recently working with protecting some sensitive data in a typical Java application with a database underneath. We convert the data on its way out of the application using Spring Security Crypto Utilities . It "was decided" that we'd be doing AES with a key-length of 256 , and this just happens to be the kind of encryption Spring crypto does out of the box. Sweet! The big aber is that whatever JRE is running the application has to be patched with Oracle's JCE in order to do 256 bits. It's a fascinating story , the short version being that U.S. companies are restricted from exporting various encryption algorithms to certain countries, and some countries are restricted from importing them. Once I had patched my JRE with the JCE, I found it fascinating how straight forward it was to encrypt and decrypt using the Spring Encryptors. So just for fun at the weekend, I threw together a little desktop app that will encrypt and decrypt stuff for the given password

What I've Learned After a Month of Podcasting

So, it's been about a month since I launched GitMinutes , and wow, it's been a fun ride. I have gotten a lot of feedback, and a lot more downloads/listeners than I had expected! Judging the numbers is hard, but a generous estimate is that somewhere around 2000-3000 have listened to the podcast, and about 500-1000 regularly download. Considering that only a percentage of my target audience actively listen to podcasts, these are some pretty good numbers. I've heard that 10% of the general population in the western world regularly listen to podcasts (probably a bit higher percentage among Git users), so I like to think I've reached a big chunk of the Git pros out there. GitMinutes has gathered 110 followers on Twitter, and 63, erm.. circlers on Google+, and it has received 117 +'es! And it's been flattr'ed twice :) Here are some of the things I learned during this last month: Conceptually.. Starting my own sandbox podcast for trying out everythin

Git tools for keeping patches on top of moving upstreams

At work, we maintain patches for some pretty large open source repositories that regularly release new versions, forcing us to update our patches to match. So far, we've been using basic Git operations to transplant our modifications from one major version of the upstream to the next. Every time we make such a transplant, we simply squash together the modifications we made in the previous version, and land it as one big commit into the next version. Those who are used to very stringent keeping of Git history may wrinkle their nose at this, but it is a pragmatic choice. Maintaining modifications on top of the rapidly changing upstream is a lot of work, and so far we haven't had the opportunity to figure out a more clever way to do it. Nor have we really suffered any consequences of not having an easy to read history of our modifications - it's a relatively small amount of patches, after all. With a recent boost in team size, we may have that opportunity. Also the need for be

The Git Users Mailing List

A year ago or so, I came across the Git-user mailing list (aka. "Git for human beings"). Over the year, I grew a little addicted to helping people out with their Git problems. When the new git-scm.com webpage launched , and the link to the mailing list had disappeared, I was quick to ask them to add it again . I think this mailing list fills an important hole in the Git community between: The Git developer mailing list git@vger.kernel.org - which I find to be a bit too hard-core and scary for Git newbies. Besides, the Majordomo mailing list system is pretty archaic, and I personally can't stand browsing or searching in the Gmane archives. The IRC channel #git on Freenode, which is a bit out-of-reach for people who never experienced the glory days of IRC. Furthermore, when the channel is busy, it's a big pain to follow any discussion. StackOverflow questions tagged git , these come pretty close, but it's a bit hard to keep an overview of what questio