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Git hosting

Are you looking for free Git hosting? Or perhaps Mercurial hosting or a VCS hosting alternative to github.com? If you answer yes to at least one of these questions, this post will be useful for you. You are welcome!

Andrei Kaleshka
Andrei Kaleshka · 3 min read

After finding my github repository instead of my project in google, I started searching for free Git hosting that would let me hide my projects from Google’s crawler. And I was surprised when I found a lot of services that suited me. I will describe one of them in this article: bitbucket.

Introduction

Bitbucket provides both mercurial and git hosting, with an unlimited number of private projects and unlimited disk space per account! This system was written by Atlassian, the company behind JIRA and Confluence. Go to their site and check it out.

Pricing

BitBucket pricing

This screenshot may be outdated. To check current pricing, please visit the bitbucket site.

As you can see, a free account has a restriction: a maximum of 5 users with write access to your project. 5 members is a very large number for one team. If this plan isn’t enough, you can buy the next plan with 10 collaborators for $10 per month. Compare that with github’s price — $24 per month for 10 collaborators and 20 projects — while here you have an unlimited number of private projects and unlimited disk space. It is a very cheap and tempting offer!

Sign up

It is very easy to sign up here. OpenID is available through services:

  • Google
  • Yahoo!
  • AOL
  • OpenID
  • MyOpenID
  • LiveJournal
  • Flickr
  • WordPress
  • VeriSign
  • ClaimID

After signing up, you can create a repository.

Migrate from github

It is very easy to create a Git repository here. You have 2 choices: create a project from scratch as you do on github, or import an existing repository from github, Google code, Mercurial, SourceForge or Subversion. I preferred to import my source code from github:

  1. Type the URL for your public repo. If you want to migrate a private repo, check the Requires authorization checkbox and fill in the username and password for your github account.
  2. Type the repository name that bitbucket will use. You can also choose whether this repo will be private or public. Select the VCS: git or mercurial.
  3. You can also enable issue tracking and Wiki pages.
  4. Then select the main programming language for your repository. You can also write a description and set a website URL.

And that’s it! Press the Import button and wait while bitbucket fetches the code from github. Nice feature — you can migrate your existing source code from github in several minutes. Don’t forget to add your SSH key to your bitbucket account if you want to commit to the migrated repository.

Alternatives

There are many other similar services:

But they have more restrictions or higher prices. So my choice is bitbucket!

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