On: Data Loss at GitLab

[deckar01]

> GitLab cost everyone a day

GitLab isn't popular because of the stability of its cloud platform. It's popular because you can install your own instance for free practically anywhere with minimal effort.

I run GitLab CE on a box in my server closet for projects that involve livelihoods.

[praneshp → deckar01]

I know (because I use it and also host it at home, and like it). The point of my comment was HN's reaction.

[Spare_account → praneshp]

Remember that HN is not a single-minded mob, during each incident a particular group was vocal on a given subject but that group may not have been the same individuals who were vocal each time.

[praneshp → Spare_account]

Fair point, thank you.

[ergo14 → deckar01]

You can also look at RhodeCode CE - supports git/mercurial/svn and has a really nice installer you can use to keep things up to date.

[thewhitetulip → deckar01]

>It's popular because you can install your own instance for free practically anywhere with minimal effort.

If that is the reason why you use Gitlab, then why not try gitea or gogs? gogs is written in Go and provides a docker image or a drop in binary

[pritambarhate → thewhitetulip]

I have been running Gitlab CE for around three years now and I am very happy with it. The interface it good. The access management works very good. And the best part? Keeping it updated is very easy on a ubuntu box. Just a couple of very easy commands.

I am so happy with Gitlab that I didn't even install Gogs even once to give it a try, though I know about it since it's initial days. For me Gitlab CE just works. Unless Gitea shows a 10x feature I am very unlikely to shift away from Gitlab CE.

[problems → thewhitetulip]

GitLab is a lot more feature packed than Gitea/Gogs. Gogs is lightweight, good for personal projects, but if you're looking for something to deploy company wide with integrated everything, Gitlab is the way to go.

[sdesol → problems]

I think this is changing at a pretty fast pace ... well for Gitea anyways. It also looks like Gitea is lighting a fire under Gogs, as they appear to be iterating at a faster pace as well. Here's a very quick breakdown of what's going on.

Activity for the last 160 days. There were 175 commits to gogs and 720 commits to gitea.

https://gitsense.com/gogs-gitea/commits-160days.png

Activity for the last 60 days. There were 109 commits to gogs and 262 to gitea.

https://gitsense.com/gogs-gitea/commits-60days.png

https://gitsense.com/gogs-gitea/changes-60days.png

https://gitsense.com/gogs-gitea/changes-files-60days.png

The options and vendors directory are unique to Gitea and they account for a lot of the changes within the last 60 days. I was told the vendors directory is used to store dependencies but I don't know what the options directory is used for. And as the following shows, they account for a lot of the files touched, in the last 60 days.

https://gitsense.com/gogs-gitea/changes-options-vendor-60day...

Based on what I've read on Hacker News, the developer behind Gogs, tends to merge in changes in spurts, so it's hard to tell if this recent flurry of activity is a spurt or not. In this 365 days of activity, you can see the 3 spurts for Gogs so far.

https://gitsense.com/gogs-gitea/commits-365days.png

Regardless of whether or not Gogs will continue to develop at an increased rated, it looks like Gitea will.

[E6300 → thewhitetulip]

Gogs is pretty sweet. After hearing about it here I installed it on my old home server with constrained memory because I couldn't meet Gitlab's (IMO) obscene memory requirements. It's perfect for my needs as a hobbyist and I even use it as a secondary Git server from work. It's also way, way faster than a self-hosted Gitlab or any public Git server, so even though my current server has more than enough memory to run Gitlab, I still use Gogs.

The only (minor) issue I've had with it was when I tried to push the OpenCV repository to it, just for the hell of it, on a heavily constrained VM (Debian with 256 MiB of RAM). The poor thing just couldn't handle it without crashing until I upped the memory to a couple gigabytes.

[tscs37 → E6300]

It might be related to git and not Gogs/Gitea itself.

I've found Gitea to handle larger repos fine after running the following:

  git config --global core.packedGitWindowSize 16m
  git config --global core.packedGitLimit 64m
  git config --global pack.windowMemory 64m
  git config --global pack.packSizeLimit 64m
  git config --global pack.thread 1
  git config --global pack.deltaCacheSize 1m

This reduces the memory used by git during certain operations.