
Bitbucket now rocks Git - amitparikh
http://blog.bitbucket.org/2011/10/03/bitbucket-now-rocks-git/
======
johnthedebs
This is great news, very exciting for people who need a nice place to stash
all their private git repos but didn't want to upgrade their GitHub plans for
not-that-important projects. Very interesting that they've decided to compete
directly too.

I wonder if/how GitHub will respond. I strongly prefer their UI and already
have a paid plan, but I find myself shuffling repos within the confines of
that plan rather than stomaching the (admittedly not very big) upgrade cost
since many of the projects aren't super important. I understand why they do
it, but I just don't like that they place an arbitrary restriction on the
number of private repos.

~~~
grandalf
we'll see how GH responds in the face of competition like this. Now I no
longer need to go beyond the $7/month github plan.

I could see GH creating an "unlimited" account for $20/month that allows up to
3mb of files and unlimited repos.

~~~
loganlinn
I think an appropriate GH response would be to make a few/all personal (aka 0
collaborators) private repos free.

~~~
famousactress
This is a _stellar_ idea.

I just wonder if there's a bit of a culture-jam here. It'd tempt you to not
open up projects as freely, which seems at odds with the ideals of the GH
camp.

~~~
nirvdrum
The public repo thing is a bit odd anyway. Many public projects don't have a
license attached to them. So they're not really open source, they're not
public domain, they're just publicly viewable but you have no license to use
it.

------
LeafStorm
You know, I actually expected that the opposite would happen: GitHub would
start offering Mercurial hosting.

Because Git isn't what attracts most people to GitHub. It's the sheer fact
that GitHub is frickin' HUGE and has lots of people who will show up, fork
your project, and send you a pull request. I love Bitbucket, but honestly if
GitHub added Mercurial support I would probably move all the way to GitHub
because of the size of the community.

GitHub is already pretty firmly entrenched in the Git community. I will say,
however, that Bitbucket has one primary advantage over GitHub: Unlimited
private repositories, with the cost being based on how many collaborators you
have. If Bitbucket really promotes this angle, I could see a lot of small
development teams moving to Bitbucket, and possibly taking their talent with
them. So, if Bitbucket really pushes the "unlimited private repositories"
angle, then they could begin taking back market share from GitHub.

~~~
eropple
_Because Git isn't what attracts most people to GitHub. It's the sheer fact
that GitHub is frickin' HUGE and has lots of people who will show up, fork
your project, and send you a pull request. I love Bitbucket, but honestly if
GitHub added Mercurial support I would probably move all the way to GitHub
because of the size of the community._

This sums up my feelings exactly. I'm emphatically not a fan of the Github
guys (who seem rather unprofessional), but the community is too big to ignore.
I'll probably switch if/when they support hg, unless Atlassian can find a way
to encourage a much more robust community in Bitbucket.

(And no, Github fans, hg-git is not "support" for hg.)

~~~
burgerbrain
_"I'm emphatically not a fan of the Github guys (who seem rather
unprofessional)"_

How so? They're quite snappy with the support in my experience, and handled
the firesheep situation much better than most companies.

~~~
ericb
Not the OP, but I sent a friendly note asking a question that was perhaps a
bit dumb--just asking to clarify what one "collaborator" meant to them. The
response I got back was a bit rude.

Keep in mind my email said I was _choosing a subscription plan_. As someone
who has done support, being rude to people about to purchase your service is
even dumber than the question I asked...

~~~
eropple
I encountered something similar as well with their subscription plans. This
was before a friend pointed me to Bitbucket, at which I've been very happy
since.

------
ollysb
Free unlimited private repos for up to 5 users; with competition like that
maybe we'll see github improve it's pricing.

~~~
krobertson
I doubt it. There is no need for them to, they aren't hurting or struggling.

Running businesses with "lets offer more for free" and "ohh crap, they offer
more for free, lets lower our price" is a race to the bottom.

It is actually moves like these that make me question Bitbucket more. How
viable is the service long term? Do I want to trust all my own code to them?

~~~
ergo14
You sound like an apple customer, you get more for same price and consider
this a bad thing... Pigs indeed fly.

It doesn't cost them a lot more in infrastructure to provide alternate dvcs -
so your point seems to be completly invalid. More and more I'm starting to
think that git is some kind of religion.

We benefit from competition between those 2 platforms and in the end this is
what should count the most for us - customers.

~~~
skrebbel
It's amazing that your comment got thumbed down, not up. All points seem
perfecly valid, so it really must be the "Apple customer" reference that
killed it. Sad.

~~~
SnowLprd
What's sad is the absurd claim that Apple customers believe that getting more
for the same price is a bad thing. As for the next point, whether providing
alternative DVCS access leads to greater fixed infrastructure costs or not,
that seems like a completely orthogonal point to the "race to the bottom"
topic that the OP raised. If all players involved reduce their prices (and
therefore top-line revenue) to near zero, it doesn't matter how low the
infrastructure costs are -- everyone is still broke in that scenario. So no,
not all points here seem valid. Far from it: by my count, it looks like 0 for
2 so far.

One point, however, rings true: competition is good for we end-users, and it's
certainly exciting that Bitbucket now offers both hg and git access.

~~~
ergo14
Why would you claim that someone reduced their prices and revenue to zero? How
does providing additional functionality relate to price reduction? I'm really
surprised by this comment - do you have any data to base this assumption?

To me it's opening to customers with different demands.

------
mushishi
As a daily Bitbucket user, I appreciate their efforts. But unfortunately I
don't see improvement on navigation. It's quite painful to browse source code
via web. If I just want to quickly look at someone's repository, I will make a
lot of browsing, and it's just way too slow.

Compare it to Github's slick UI: <https://github.com/blog/760-the-tree-slider>

But I am optimistic Bitbucket will change it for the better.

~~~
brodie
(I'm a Bitbucket developer.)

I completely agree that UI's something we need to improve on. I do think we've
been making progress: We recently redesigned the commit history page, we've
cleaned up the repository and account admin pages, and we've been updating the
whole site with a more streamlined look and feel.

One of the next big things on our roadmap is redoing the repository header
(that thing with all the tabs and buttons). And personally, I'd like to see us
standardize on a single repo landing page with everything you need, but that's
a little controversial at the moment. :)

We're huge fans of defunkt's pjax library, so expect to see it used more on
the site in the future - including in the source browser.

Oh, and we're currently looking for a designer!
<http://www.atlassian.com/about/careers/listing.jsp?jobID=143>

~~~
sandGorgon
Yes please - small things like the branches drop down are not very intuitive.

I think the competitive advantage for Bitbucket will come from super-enhancing
features like the issue tracker. Today, I still have to run Redmine inspite of
having Github issues. Give me an industrial quality issue tracker (hooks,
assignee features, charting, roles and permissions).

Basically just pull Bugzilla into Bitbucket. Now, that would be a killer
feature !

~~~
SoftwareMaven
Please, NO. I would cringe at a full version of Jira being included, too. If I
want one of those, I will install one of them. I do think BB's issues are
under-powered (and it is a major problem), but I'd much rather have a clean,
clear, well-designed 20% of Jira.

~~~
mtogo
In BB's defense, GH's issue system is horribly underpowered too.

------
sosuke
The only reason I went with Bitbucket over Github for my own source control
was the availability of free private repositories that Github charges for. Now
I've got the best of both source control solutions!

------
dhimes
_store every line of code you’ve ever wrote in one place without paying a
cent_

Great news (and thanks)! However, please s/wrote/written/

EDIT: I see they fixed the copy.

~~~
jstepka
Thanks for pointing this out.

~~~
ergosum
Since we have your attention... :)

[http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/BITBUCKET/Bitbucket+...](http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/BITBUCKET/Bitbucket+101)
\- shows error message "Unable to render {include} The included page could not
be found."

~~~
farkas
Thanks. As I'm sure you've guessed, this was a permissions problem with some
of the pages we'd been keeping quiet until the launch. Let us know if you find
any more.

------
yesimahuman
I use GitHub mainly for private repos. I think I will actually move my private
repos over to Bitbucket.

I really like GitHub Issues though. Does Bitbucket have anything similar? I
don't see it on their site.

~~~
kingofspain
Bitbucket issues had a recent update (only noticed it today myself) and it's
much improved. It's a little basic but it fits my needs pretty well.

You can see one at [https://bitbucket.org/jespern/django-
piston/issues?status=ne...](https://bitbucket.org/jespern/django-
piston/issues?status=new&status=open)

~~~
elehack
Oh wow, that is an improvement. Their issue UI used to be pretty bad. I'm glad
they've improved it so much. Might be time to re-evaluate using it.

------
zemanel
Atlassian (which recently acquired Bitbucket) is well known
forJira/Confluence.

Could it be that if they might use Bitbucket as an entry point to their
products? Perhaps with more integration.

~~~
cmelbye
It seems as if they've already released a fairly simple plugin to integrate
Bitbucket with JIRA, which is nice. I'd personally like to see deeper
integration between Bitbucket and Atlassian products like Crucible, JIRA,
Confluence, etc.

~~~
sherifmansour
Although I can see the many possible integrations between Crucible, JIRA and
BitBucket, I'd love to hear if you have any thoughts on Confluence and
BitBucket integration. Right now you can quickly view the contents of a
BitBucket repo from a Confluence page:
<https://plugins.atlassian.com/plugin/details/40188>

------
dewiz
perhaps they should update the web site:

=== Thank you for signing up for Bitbucket!

You are currently on the 5 Users plan. You can always upgrade your plan to add
more collaborators.

We're excited that you're getting started with Mercurial, arguably the best
distributed version control system around. We've put together some great
resources to get you up and running quickly so that your team can focus on
building great software faster.

Cheers, The Atlassian Bitbucket team ===

------
tomblomfield
I looked at this and thought "this is like Github, but not as good"

If you're even semi-serious about development, paying $7/month is nothing for
the value they provide.

~~~
ashleyw
Any semi-serious developer is going to use up the 5 private repos really
quickly. 20 repos ($22/mo) is easily achievable for anyone who likes side-
projects, and after that, larger plans are only "available on request".

I wouldn't expect GitHub to compete directly with BitBucket's pricing, but
doubling the amount of private repos allowed wouldn't hurt.

~~~
shazow
Many serious developers opt to keep as much of their source open as they can.
It's not uncommon to find dozens of public side projects in the repository
list of Github users. Occasionally someone will stumble on something
interesting and collaborators will sprout. This is far less common on
Bitbucket.

Github's pricing policy seems to strongly encourage community and
collaboration, and it works wonders.

~~~
ElliotH
As a student I make regular use of private repos because publishing answers to
marked coursework is frowned upon.

~~~
nirvdrum
This is largely true when you graduate as well. I still have all my grad
coursework in git and find it useful to reference, but don't want to make
public due to academic dishonesty.

~~~
shazow
I'd love to hear more about this academic dishonesty. I've been disconnected
from academia for a long time.

For me, I specifically make a lot of my work public to avoid someone else
claiming sole invention rights--as I have reasonable public proof of prior
art. Though to this day this has never happened, and people have always given
my projects more than appropriate credit without even having to ask.

~~~
nirvdrum
Having served as a TA, I can assure you some students will seek out anything
tangentially related and make few if any modifications to the project. This
isn't just a case of reused projects, too. A lot of times our assignments
would be open-ended within a framework (e.g., create a game that uses the
minimax algorithm). Things like that. And naturally they seek out anyone that
had taken the class previously.

------
tyler_ball
This is great news and I hope it helps do all that others are saying, like
improve pricing.

I've had a Bitbucket account for a while and never used it, mainly because I'm
more comfortable with git. But after poking around Bitbucket and importing
some repos I'm seeing that you really get what you pay for.

GitHub completely trounces Bitbucket with their ease of use and toolset. I
hope Bitbucket can step it up.

------
Triumvark
This has probably been asked before, but is Bitbucket really unlimited?

If I encrypt my drive, convert it to ASCII, and upload it, will they host it?

~~~
rcthompson
Good luck committing an image of your hard drive into git or hg.

Seriously, though, the limitations of git and mercurial with respect to large
files probably prevent them from having to deal with this kind of thing.

~~~
pclouds
<https://github.com/apenwarr/bup> can help split a big image into many smaller
pieces.

------
j45
I signed up for Bitbucket the instant they had git availability. I only
started using Git regularly for new/small projects a month ago, after quite
happily using svn for web projects.

Bitbucket gets what I need. I love the social coding of GitHub and will
continue to participate in it. But I can't put my own projects there. There's
too many small, private repos that I can't keep paying for.

Bitbucket's approach is good for me. I'd rather pay for storage/users than per
repo. If Github is really about promoting source code control, it shouldn't be
a barrier for private / personal projects. For now, bitbucket solves this. I
hope Github comes around.

Until then, I'm cancelling my $7 github account and giving Bitbucket $10/month
even though I'm only using 2 users. They're doing me a real service and favor.

------
cheald
I'm now a BitBucket user. I'll keep using GitHub for my open source stuff, but
you betcha that my private repos are going on BitBucket. I'd love to see
GitHub step up and compete here, but I'm really perfectly happy to use two
products for two different use cases.

~~~
systems
This was exactly what I was thinking Git is the same, moving a Git repo from
bitbucket to github shouldn't be an issue

bitbucket for your private repos, promote to github for when they become open-
source to benefit from the larger community

i believe github might end up charging for public repos, rather than reducing
the prices for private ones ;)

------
jaip
They announced Git support in 2009 also, but that was an April Fool's joke.
Link to that post: <http://blog.bitbucket.org/2009/04/01/announcing-git-
support/>

------
MatthewPhillips
I just checked and none of my existing Bitbucket repos have a Git link, nor
can I find a way to add Git support from the Admin screen. However when I go
to add a new repo Git is an option.

Please tell me (frown face) that this feature isn't just for new repos....

~~~
brodie
When we were prototyping Git support, one of the first things we investigated
was having automatic conversion between Hg and Git on the server. We weren't
able to get the performance to a level where responsiveness would be
acceptable, and maintaining consistency between the two repos was complex.

It's something we might revisit in the distant future. As a middle ground,
I've been thinking of implementing support for multiple SCMs in a single
repository with the conversion/syncing process left up to the user. But
that'll probably take more than a couple of 20% days to bang out. :)

If you're interested, I have some patches against hg-git that make it easier
to take an existing Hg repo and convert it to Git (as opposed to the other way
around). I haven't had a chance to prepare them to go upstream yet, but my
repo's here: <https://bitbucket.org/brodie/hg-git>

~~~
MatthewPhillips
I don't care about converting my code, I'll just delete the .hg directories, I
care about having to create new repos MyProject2, MyOtherProject2

------
kellishaver
Definitely going to give this a go. I have a lot of repos I'd like to keep
private, but they're mostly personal projects and not worth paying more money
for at GitHub.

Quick question from someone new to Bitbucket:

I have to authenticate every time I push to the repo. I've added my SSH key to
the account, but I assume there's some additional configuration, such as how
github has you add values for github.user and github.token to your global git
config, but I can't find any such info for what those variables need to be for
Bitbucket - assuming that's the reason I'm still continually prompted for a
password.

Has anyone sorted this out yet or got SSH authentication working with Git &
Bitbucket?

~~~
petedoyle
Make sure to use git@bitbucket.org:{username}/{reponame} instead of any https
links bitbucket might give you.

I was able to upload an existing repo I had by:

1) Uploading my SSH Public Key at <https://bitbucket.org/account/> (i.e. the
contents of ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub) 2) Create a blank repo at Bitbucket 3) Adding a
remote (git remote add bitbucket git@bitbucket.org:{username}/{reponame}.git)
4) Pushing to bitbucket (git push bitbucket master)

The most important parts were adding my SSH Public Key, and making sure to use
git@bitbucket.org:{username}/{reponame}.git instead of any https links you
might see on bitbucket.

~~~
kellishaver
Ah, thanks so much! That makes perfect sense. I was using the https link that
bigbucket provided initially.

------
mark_l_watson
I just signed up for a free account and already made 6 private git repos.
Nice.

I must say that I wish there was a middle road between bitbucket and github
pricing: I like to pay enough money to to be fair. I will eventually have
about 20 small repos, most of which I won't use very often. Solo developer.

It would not cost much at all to support a user such as myself, so if the cost
were about $5/month that would be better than free. That said, it is so easy
to move git hosting back to one of my EC2s, that if they decide to not provide
this service in the future it is only a small hassle.

------
flocial
While this is great news, I really don't need an interface for sideprojects
(yet). Codeplane's been great so far for private repos.

I just backed up my Github stuff using Github-backup and added them to
Codeplane. Honestly surprised nobody challenged GitHub in pricing until
recently. As far as social coding goes they are the Facebook of repo hosting
(SourceForge is Friendster and Google Code is MySpace).

<https://github.com/ddollar/github-backup>

<http://codeplane.com/>

------
amalag
I was using unfuddle.com just to get a single private repository (didn't want
to pay $10 a month for that on github). This is great news.

~~~
lclarkmichalek
I'm in exactly the same position, and will now proceed to move all private
repos over to bitbucket.

------
Rotor
Great to see bitbucket expanding the offering.

A while back I had chosen bitbucket over GitHub because of the free private
repository. And Git was not an absolute requirement, non-Git source control
was absolutely fine.

GitHub still does not offer a private repo for free (currently private is
$7/month), I imagine this may change at some point soon now.

------
uptown
Great news! Wish I'd seen it before I finally took the leap and signed up for
a paid GitHub account this morning.

~~~
varikin
I agree. I just signed up for a paid account on Saturday for one project I
didn't want public. Time to reassess my options.

------
daemin
I still use an installation of Gitosis on my VPS to host my small private git
projects. As long as you have a unix-ey box then it's very easy to set it up.
Though I would definitely upload public projects to Github, for the community
and visibility aspect of it.

------
dirtyhand
Hopefully this is a wakeup call for the Github guys and they start working on
their business instead of just the product. This is a great start:
<http://fi.github.com/>

------
heisenmink
This is really good news.

The greatest strength they have over Github right now is unlimited private git
repositories (github only allows 1 private repo for free accounts), free of
charge.

~~~
asb
I'm pretty sure Github don't allow any private repos on free accounts (at
least I can't create any).

------
6ren
How is this justified, to _stay_ free?

True, it preps users for other Atlassian products; and marginal cost of
storage is near-zero these days.

------
drawkbox
I love bitbucket for the pricing it turned out to be a more valuable tool for
my private repos. Now it is even better with git.

------
dahlia
I really love Bitbucket (over GitHub!), but it seems too late for me.

~~~
aymeric
BitBucket makes it super easy to migrate from GitHub to them.

------
mtogo
Blog post by schacon trash talking bitbucket in 3... 2... 1...

------
rmc
Bitbucket (a popular mercurial hosting site) has added git support.

Has any popular git hosting site added mercurial support?

This shows which DVCS is winning.

~~~
ergo14
It's a power grab, and we benefit from it. There is no need for any DVCS to
"win". Now you can use whatever you want without restrictions, why force
others to use what you use?

~~~
farkas
(disclaimer - I'm the CEO of Atlassian)

Developers are religious. Whether it is vi vs emacs, or IDEA vs Eclipse or Mac
vs Linux. In September we had a huge debate internally (hundreds of comments
long) on functional vs non-functional programming.

We know that no-one wins in these religious debates.

We've found that developers are equally religious regarding their DVCS. Most
frequently it is whatever DVCS you started with is the one that you're
passionate about.

We've found that most companies of any size have both Git and Mercurial
lurking somewhere in their development ranks. Previously if they wanted to
host their code in the cloud (and who wouldn't), they would have had to choose
two different hosting providers. As a developer, this was a pain as you never
knew where your code was.

Now that Bitbucket supports both, you no longer have to choose. We think this
is a huge win! Companies can store _all_ their code in one place. And with the
per-user pricing, it is a very fair pricing model (don't have to think about
whether a fork is going to cost you or not!).

~~~
pixeloution
If we had to re-make the decision of what remote DVCS host to use, I'd
certainly look strongly at bitbucket. We have only a small handful of
developers, but many repositories (60+) all getting low traffic.

We've used both Github and Beanstalkapp.com and both charge based on total
repos rather then disk space or developers which, frankly, drives me a bit
insane. I think both have better features then bitbucket (as far as I am
aware) and better UI's (subjective) but my 60 small repos run me $100/month at
beanstalk - not sure what it would run @ github.

I can't find any disk usage limits @ BB's site, which makes me wonder if there
are hidden caps. If BB ever struck me as being as slick as github, I'd move
our business in a second, even if the cost was higher then it is now ($10 a
month? Really?!).

~~~
farkas
Just as a FYI - we don't have any disk limits (apart from fair use).

We don't want our pricing to be based on repos, or disk space, or any other
limitation that is hard to predict, or encourages sub-optimal decision making
to optimise cost. We think that users is the best way to price a product, and
is easy to predict.

In terms of UI - there are things that bug me today, but our team is cranking
along improving it.

But we have found that most of our users spend their time interacting via the
command-line, and therefore we have prioritised features around stability and
performance, as well as enabling Git support. Now that this is done, we'll be
focusing more time on UI again.

~~~
danieldk
_Just as a FYI - we don't have any disk limits (apart from fair use)._

Let me ask you about a particular case then :). I am in a group that develops
a natural language parser for Dutch. It's open source, but so far we have been
hosting it in a private Subversion repository on our university servers. We do
provide a read-only (somewhat hidden) git mirror of the tree, but we have
considered publishing it as an public git repository, but were always worried
that the repository is too large for hosting it externally.

The git repository has existed for one and a half year, and the bare repo is
currently 1098 MB in size*. Would hosting such a repository on Bitbucket be
considered fair-use?

~~~
farkas
It's fine. However, we would recommend pushing and pulling over SSH for speed.

And let me clarify: by fair-use we mean we offer unlimited _code_ hosting, not
general storage. We monitor for abuse, such as large repos containing only
music, videos, and public viruses or malware. Though don't worry - if we
notice any problems we'd of course contact you first.

We'd love to have you as a customer!

~~~
danieldk
Farkas, thank you for this information!

