You can't beat GitHub for Open Source projects
September 01, 2017
You can't beat GitHub for Open Source projects
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with GitHub
We're a SaaS company and we use GitHub to host all of our private and public git repos. It helps us easily manage collaboration between our internal team of developers as well as the contract developers we hire from time to time. It allows us to easily see a history of changes to our code, but also helps with tracking issues and doing code reviews.
- Pull Requests are a great way for developers to work on their own forks and then when it's ready to merge they can submit a pull request and another member of the team can review the code before it gets merged.
- Reliable hosting. I've never had any kind of significant issue with availability of my repos. Once in a while, there might be a hiccup, but it's usually resolved within 5 minutes.
- Having a wiki available for each repository is a great way to add documentation for your code. If there are instructions for deploying, or information explaining the reasoning for doing something, it's great to be able to just add a page to the wiki.
- There are certain developers whose work I rely heavily on. I wish it was easier to browse and search all the repositories they contribute to.
- I'd like to see more granular control of how I watch repositories that I don't own. If I choose "watching", I get notified every time something happens. I'd like to be able to choose what events I want to be notified about (new push, new tag, etc). I'd also like to be able to choose a digest notification where I get one email a day with the events I'm interested in.
- It would be great if there was a way to automatically keep forks up to date. It has support for merging, so why couldn't a toggle to keep a fork updated with the upstream. That way everytime a commit gets pushed it would get rebased into my fork.
- I don't have to manage my own git servers. It just works and I don't have to think about it.
- I liked the old pricing structure where you could have unlimited contributors but paid for private repos. We have lots of contractors and random collaborators, but relatively few private repos. The new pricing would be too expensive for us, so we haven't switched.
- Most developers we work with already have a github account, so it's a great tool for hiring, but also it's easy to onboard because devs are already familiar with it.
We picked GitHub because it's what I was most familiar with when we started. We're testing out self-hosted Gitlab because it not only handles all the features we're using on GitHub, but it also has a continuous integration service which is currently implemented by a third party (CircleCI) with GitHub. We started testing out Bitbucket in the larger context of the Atlassian products. Bitbucket was great, but we found everything else (JIRA, Bamboo, etc) to be too complicated to use.