Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Gitblit and SCM-Manager - inhouse GitHub alternatives for companies

by Sarah Haselbauer (Akquinet tech@spree GmbH)

Wednesday, 22.05.2013, New York I, 10:45-11:30 Uhr

Companies are often reluctant to host their source code with services like GitHub or Bitbucket. Besides the costs involved, there are other concerns such as security, legal matters and accessibility. On the other hand, in-house installations of Git servers such as Gitorious and GitLab can be painful to set up and hard to maintain. Gitblit and SCM-Manager are excellent alternatives for companies which are still searching for a Git server that is portable, actually fun to install and easy to upgrade. This talk presents a reusable and adjustable concept for setting up your own Git server quickly and hosting it with satisfaction. It highlights the unique features of Gitblit and SCM-Manager and also illustrates different approaches for dealing with their limitations.

Features like fine-grained permissions per repository and repository grouping are examined according to their usability and effectiveness in everyday use in projects following all sorts of different software development approaches. Experiences integrating Gitblit and SCM-Manager with issue-tracking systems and continuous integration servers will be shared. Moreover, various strategies for introducing Gitblit or SCM-Manager into a company are compared. These strategies focus on enabling the intended users (namely the software developers and project team leaders) to succeed with your in-house hosted Git server.

SCM-Manager and Gitblit are both still quite young open-source projects with few committers. Feature implementations and bugfixes can be slow in coming. Thus, the limitations of Gitblit and SCM-Manager have to be addressed by a more general approach covering both the organisational level as well as the implementation level. This talk describes how akquinet tech@spree deals with different types of limitations - those known in advance as well as those which are first raised when using Gitblit or SCM-Manager in production.

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About the author Sarah Haselbauer:

Sarah Haselbauer organisiert die Entwicklungsinfrastruktur bei akquinet tech@spree. Sie unterstützt Projekte beim Aufbau nahtloser Prozesse zur Überführung des Quellcodes in auslieferbare Produkte und betreut die Hauptsysteme der Entwicklungsinfrastruktur. Ihr Schwerpunkt liegt auf der Harmonisierung von administrativen, organisationalen Zielen und den Interessen der Entwickler. Sie hält einen B.Sc. in Wirtschaftsinformatik und einen M.Sc. in Information Systems. In ihrer täglichen Arbeit kombiniert sie Erfahrungen aus verschiedensten Bereichen wie SOA, Prozessmanagement und Softwarearchitektur sowie technischem Know-How aus den Bereichen Softwareentwicklung und Administration.