[kwlug-disc] Best DIY git service options

[Giles Malet]

On Fri, 04 Dec 2015 15:27:17 -0500
Nick Guenther <nguenthe at uwaterloo.ca> wrote:

>  Are you marketing it to campus at all?

There were requests from a couple of profs to have such a service available. We realised it could be useful for others too, but had no real idea of what demand would be like, and also very little experience in large Git repositories in general. So initially it was quietly set up, and those profs (and a few others), quietly used it, as a means of testing usability, and seeing how many resources were going to be used.

It's been running a year or more now, and is being used by more and more people as word spreads, including in courses, as well as by internal development groups, like WCMS / student portal, open data, etc., and it seems everything has worked out all right, and load / space etc. is not a problem. So growth has been intentionally slow, and we haven't really marketed it, but perhaps the time is nigh. So tell you friends, forwards the news! You're all welcome to use it if you can, and we will probably start doing a better job of promoting it, now that we're pretty happy with how things worked out.

Btw, to reiterate what I said earlier, I use docker to get a test system running in minutes, without fear of colliding Ruby versions and all that. Setting it up from "bare metal" installs (which is what I did) is a lot of work, and upgrading is messy. Maybe we'll even switch the prod instance to docker some day, as it's so easy to deal with, and upgrades are trivial, without risk of breaking other things on the server. I'd definitely use a docker image if I were to set this up on my own server.

g