I want GitHub Enterprise, but with almost none of its features

August 22, 2015 1:04 PM

I want to host my own large scale Git setup, but without all of the social collaboration tools that solutions like GitHub and Bitbucket bring to the table. All I really want is web based admin tools for a deployment with 100's of repos, and 100's of users. And I want it for like $.50 per user per month.

I have an idea for a side project that boils down to a hosted document version control system.^* I'd like to keep all the data on my servers, keep change history, secure one user's information from another, allow changes made in one place (like a local client) to be easily merged up into the main repo, etc.

GitHub Enterprise would solve almost all of issues, except 90% of what I'd be paying for (easy collaboration between teams, Pull Requests, Wikis, Issues, Pages, web based view of commit history and code, etc, etc.) would not be used at all. And since the enterprise versions of GitHub, Bitbucket, Gitlab, et. all cost on the order of $3 per user month, that's a lot of money for something I really don't need.

All I really want is the web based Administration stuff. Is there someone who's doing large scale Git deployments with just the Admin tools and none of the user collaboration tools?

Of course I could fire up some AWS instances and just run plain old regular Git. But, then I'd have to do the repo creation, user management, etc, tools on my own. I totally could do that, but I'm wondering if someone has already built out something like that.

^* It's a bunch of other stuff too, but this is the part I'm trying to nail down right now.

posted by sideshow to Technology (10 answers total)

As you seem to know, git comes with server functionality, so maybe all you need is to add a GUI frontend to it for all the stuff that you'd normally do on the command line. There are tons of those, but GitWeb might be bare bones enough for you.
posted by rhizome at 1:19 PM on August 22, 2015

I'd grab a gitolite image from somewhere and add whatever web UI you like on top of that.
posted by michaelh at 1:40 PM on August 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

Maybe Atlassian Stash?
posted by Emanuel at 1:44 PM on August 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Sorry, I left out a crucial piece of information. I'd like something that comes with some sort of support. If not straight up paid support, than at least an app that's the open source version of a paid product.

gitolite, GitWeb, are things I consider "doing myself" since they aren't really "products" per se.

Stash comes out of to $2 a user per month with 1k users, so that's definitely over budget.

I did just find GitLab Community Edition (CE), which is reaaally close to what I want. So, maybe that is my best option.
posted by sideshow at 2:02 PM on August 22, 2015

I was about to suggest looking at GitLab. My only beef with it is that it's a bit memory-hungry so it won't run on a cheap VPS, but that's obviously not a concern of yours.
posted by neckro23 at 2:25 PM on August 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

We use Gitlab for some stuff, it's fine.
posted by miyabo at 3:13 PM on August 22, 2015

Stash is definitely pricey, but that that $24000/1000 users is a one-time payment, you can keep using it forever after you've payed that. If you want "maintenance" (support and updates) after the first year, it's a further $6000/1000 users/year (so $0.50/user/month) after that.
posted by Emanuel at 4:09 PM on August 22, 2015

Gitlab CE is really easy to get running, assuming you already have a server ready for it. I've never had any serious problems with it, though we only have 5-10 users at any time. But of course, you're then responsible for handling certain things yourself—security updates, backups, etc.

BitBucket's unlimited plan is $200/mo, which hits your price point if you can scale to 400 users. It's only $1/user/mo at lower levels, which is at least close-ish.

Looking at the giant list here: Something called RepositoryHosting offers unlimited users and repos for $6/mo, but each GB of storage is $1/mo. Depending on what you intend to store, that could hit your price point. But I've never heard of this service before this very moment, no idea if it's good or not.
posted by vasi at 6:12 PM on August 22, 2015

I've used RepositoryHosting.com before. It's okay. The extra stuff (like Trac) is a pain. I didn't see a reason, in my case, to use it once Bitbucket expanded the free version.

I would suggest Gitlab CE as well. I had figured it wasn't an option since Gitlab Enterprise was already crossed off in the question. It's definitely better than gitolite+webui for most needs.
posted by michaelh at 7:06 PM on August 22, 2015

Another happy GitLab CE user here, though again for a fairly small team. For us it's a touch slow via the Web, but then again this is a Ruby thing and we don't really do Ruby right now, so there's probably some optimizations we're not doing. It is rather easy to install and the UI isn't bad to work with. My only complaint there was that they were changing the UI quite a lot for a minute but that all seems to have calmed down.
posted by mrg at 7:26 PM on August 23, 2015