Why Choose Code Hosting Services Other Than GitHub?

Community
1

I joined the Crystal community and noticed that many people use code hosting services other than GitHub. Sourcehut and Codeberg seem especially popular, and some people prefer self-hosting with platforms like Gitea. I’ve seen many different options here. What’s your favorite code hosting service, and why?

2 Likes
2

I almost always self-host using Fossil (or hosting Fossil repos on Chisel) simply because I don’t particularly like Git’s workflow, and I strongly dislike GitHub’s overall design. It’s just too, I dunno… corporate, I guess. The way Fossil does staging, branching, stashing, and tagging all seems to flow better with my way of thinking. Plus it seems to work better with cathedral-oriented projects, which is how I like to managing my own stuff. Fossil isn’t perfect, of course (logins across projects immediately comes to mind, ugh), but I guess it just works better with my way of doing things. Plus programming is 100% a hobby for me, so I don’t have any sort of manager that dictates what I use.

There’s a Fossil vs Git article on the Fossil wiki.

Before Fossil, I was using Mercurial, and before that, I learned version control with SVN. So maybe those have had some sort of impact on my decision to focus on Fossil.

2 Likes
3

I have my own gitea to mirror all my Github repos “just in case” (I have seen enough things just go away, like Google code)

Also for things I want to be private (before Github offered private repos) and for things that are in a very early stage when I don’t know if I will actually develop them.

2 Likes
4

I use self-hosted Fossil for personal projects.

It’s partially a work/personal separation for me, just like I use a different computer and desk when working vs doing my own thing.

I use GitHub at work, so I don’t want to use it for personal projects.

Fossil just works very well for single person projects, it’s very easy to self-host and backup. I have the built in ticket system setup as a todo list.

I prefer self-hosting because it means I won’t lose access to my stuff when there’s bad internet weather (big cloud fuckup, routing issues, farmer digs up the fibre, cyclone, etc…). It feels like we have bad internet weather a couple of times a year.

2 Likes