GitMinutes #30: Luca Milanesio on Gerrit Code Review

Posted on by
Reply

git-minutesMany thanks to Thomas Ferris Nicolaisen for inviting me to talk about Gerrit Code Review at GitMinutes.

It has been a very interesting discussion on the benefits of Code Review and how Gerrit can help out small and large companies embracing it.

The interview is available on-line at http://episodes.gitminutes.com/2014/07/gitminutes-30-luca-milanesio-on-gerrit.html, alternatively you can download and listen the 1h 27′ conversation on PodCast at https://itunes.apple.com/de/podcast/gitminutes-podcasts/id637843725?l=en.

Use the force Luca!

We started (of course!) talking about the [in]famous force push of 186 Jenkins repositories to GitHub, I was on the Top-10 HackersNews over 7h … so I was expecting the question to pop-up during the interview 🙂

My friend Alex Blewitt took the opportunity as well to forge a Star-Wars like headline for his InfoQ article on what happened.

Git adoption in the Enterprise, where all began

We moved the discussion to the foundation of my business on Git and Code Review and the reasons and challenges that an Enterprise company is facing when moving to Git. We went through the history on how LMIT started GitEnterprise.com and then focused on Gerrit Code Review based product and services for large Enterprises World-Wide: a niche and successful business nowadays.

GitHub or Gerrit? or both with GerritHub?

As I expected, we ended up comparing GitHub and Gerrit analysing the similarities and differences between the two. This topic has been presented as well in two conferences at Gerrit User Summit @GooglePlex – Mountain View CA and 33rd Degree.org Java Developers Conference in Krakow; slides are available at http://www.slideshare.net/lucamilanesio/gerrit-codereviewgit-hubplugin.

Gerrit has historically been considered as “more difficult” than GitHub: true in the past but not anymore today apart from the Web User-Experience CSS styling, much nicer and pleasent on GitHub. The availability of http://gerrithub.io allowed over 1,800 developers since October 2013 to get started with Gerrit in less than 5 minutes by watching an Gerrit Introductionary YouTube video: using it was then just 3 clicks away, no installation or configuration needed! The availability of an easy and accessible Public Cloud instance represents a big improvement in accessibility and usability of Gerrit.

For which teams is Gerrit the right choice?

We talked about the “typical learning curve” of people coming from previous version control systems, such as Subversion. Does it make sense to get started with Git and Gerrit at the same time? When is Gerrit needed and when is it going to provide most of its value?

I’ve covered the topic in the past webinars and talks: hands-on Webinars recordings are freely available on-line at:

The size of the project (in terms of number of people x number of repositories) is typically one of the key factors in Code Review adoption. Gerrit however can be used as well as a standalone OpenSource Git Server , even without leveraging its Code Review capabilities: this makes the choice of Gerrit a good first step towards a smoother Git adoption.

What are Gerrit Topics about?

We went through a very interesting discussion about “Gerrit Topic”, a feature that is not new to Gerrit but is sometimes forgotten besides its important and relevance for medium-large teams.

With the forthcoming support of multi-repositories atomic commits in Gerrit, it will be possible to merge multiple changes on multiple repositories at the same time for a single topic. This feature is not ready yet but coming hopefully in the near future and Google Gerrit Team developers and contributors are working on it.

The ability to make an atomic commit across multiple repositories will allow to have a more consistent Jenkins build process as well, with less broken builds because of interdependent changes on multiple components.

Who is using Gerrit today?

We talked about the adoption of Gerrit in the community, which is growing year after year. A lot of medium companies adopted Gerrit in the past, including Spotify side-by-side with GitHub.

The ability to “submit a change” to any project without the risk to break the build is definitely an incentive to encourage even more people to contribute to share the knowledge and improve the code base, without the risk of breaking anything or  forking the code. This is one of the reason that drove large OpenSource organisations such as the Eclipse Foundation and OpenStack to the adoption Gerrit Code Review in their tools platform.

How to embrace Code Review in a Team or Company?

We went through an interesting comparison / discussion of Agile Methodology vs. Code Review. Often Teams misunderstand and confuse the concept of “review” with “pair-programming”: the problem was well analysed in my book “Learning Gerrit Code Review” (available on Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Gerrit-Code-Review-Milanesio/dp/1783289473). I defined the pair-programming as a dot in a time/people space: two developers writing a piece of code at the same time. This however does not exclude all the other points in the time/people space where multiple people at different times will read the code and provide their feedback: pair-programming is then a “specific example” of the “code review space”.

Because of the different perspectives (pair-programming is a dot whilst code-review is a “cloud of dots” in time/people space) they are not one exclusive of the other: they are equally important and both enable effective collective code ownership and knowledge sharing.

References and greetings.

It has been a very long but interesting discussion with Thomas and hope you’ll enjoy it.

See below the links of the resources we mentioned during the interview:

Thanks again to Thomas for his fantastic initiative: GitMinutes PodCast!

Luca Milanesio 

Heartbleed: GitEnterprise and GerritHub are safe

Posted on by
Reply

heartbleedA few days ago a large part of the Word Wide Web has been found vulnerable to the heartbleed bug in OpenSSL.

What is the vulnerability about?

The vulnerability is effectively a bug in all the versions of OpenSSL from Ver. 1.0.1 to 1.0.2. In reality a lot of web-sites are either using the older and still popular OpenSSL 0.9.8 or they have already upgraded to the latest patched version of OpenSSL and thus are NOT vulnerable to heartbleed.

 

Are you passwords safe ?

In a nutshell yes when they are posted or exchanged with a server that is not vulnerable to this attach:

  • GitEnterprise (gitent-scm.com) has never used any OpenSSL 1.0.1-1.0.2 (see: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=gitent%2dscm.com) and thus is not vulnerable: you can keep your existing password as they are safe.
  • GerritHub (gerrithub.io) has been vulnerable for only 5 days and then has been upgraded (see https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=gerrithub.io). However GerritHub DOES NOT exchange passwords over the Internet but rely on your existing GitHub session through OAuth Token authentication. This means that during the 5 days of vulnerability your account has NOT been at risk on GerritHub.

What about GitHub ?

Unfortunately GitHub has been vulnerable (see https://github.com/blog/1818-security-heartbleed-vulnerability) but the problem has been resolved or is under resolution right now as the nodes get upgraded.

We do recommend then to change your GitHub password in order to be sure that any previous credentials potentially stolen would not impact the security of your account and repositories.

GerritHub relies on GitHub OAuth, so is GerritHub at risk as well ?

In real terms the answer is “potentially yes”: if a potential attacker had been stolen your GitHub password, he could have initiated a login on your behalf and then accessed GerritHub as well.

How can I strengthen my GitHub  security ?

GitHub already support today the two-factor authentication (see https://help.github.com/articles/about-two-factor-authentication): if you have this extra security enabled, nobody other than you can ever access your account, even if they could have potentially stolen your password.

Can I have a GerritHub account secured independetly from GitHub ?

Not yet, however we are working on an advanced security option for the private GerritHub accounts. We will offer for a monthly extra fee:

  • Access to your GitHub private Teams and Repositories
  • Extra scripting functionality to hook Gerrit events on the server side
    (commit validation, issue tracking association, …)
  • Integration with Atlassian Jira or BugZilla
  • Integration with BuildHive from CloudBees for Continuous Integration
  • Extra enterprise account protection for GerritHub.io accounts (additional password / X.509 Certificates)

Wow, that is amazing ! When can I get GerritHub private edition ?

We are currently in public beta stage, you can start using the implemented features for FREE during the trial by logging in to GerritHub using the URL:

https://review.gerrithub.io/login?scope=scopesPrivate

Can I provide suggestions and give feedback during the public beta trial ?

Yes, you are very welcome to provide your feedback and we are very opened to adjust the development of GerritHub private features to your needs !

For problems and getting support:
http://gerritforge.com/support

For suggestions and feedback, please use the Gerrit Code Review forum:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/repo-discuss

Is GerritHub OpenSource ?

Absolutely YES: GerritHub is based on Gerrit Code Review 2.10-SNAPSHOT master with a selected set of enterprise plugins:

  • GitHub plugin
  • Codenvy plugin
  • ITS-Jira plugin
  • Scripting provider plugin
  • SingleUserGroup plugin
  • Download commands plugin
  • Replication plugin
  • Gravatar plugin
  • Review notes plugin

If you want to directly review and contribute to Gerrit, you are welcome to the developers and contributors community !

 

 

-2 days to the Gerrit User Summit 2014

Posted on by
Reply

The Gerrit User Summit 2014 is about to start in only 2 days: it is going to be a two days of exciting news and innovations on the world of Code Review. There are names from the largest industries in the world that have adopted the Code Review workflow in large enterprise environments: Google, SAP, SonyMobile, Ericsson, IBM, Garmin, HP, CollabNet, GerritForge, Codenvy, Eclipse Foundation and LibreOffice.

During all this week there is a special promotional discount on the Learning Gerrit Code Review book. Additionally, for the attendees of the conference, there will be a limited number of signed paperback copies available at the session “Gerrit or GitHub? Take both !”

Learning-Gerrit-Code-Review-QRCodeIn order to redeem the book promotion, scan the QR code and enter one of the following PROMO-CODEs:

Book PROMO-CODE: LGCRB20
eBook PROMO-CODE: LGCReB20

 

 

The Gerrit User Summit Agenda has been published yesterday and has a lot of very interesting talks and announcements:

Day 1 – Friday 21st of March

  • What’s new in Gerrit 2.8 (David Pursehouse – Gerrit maintainer – SonyMobile)
  • Scaling Gerrit at Ericsson (Patrick Renaud, Vladimir Cantiru, Hugo Ares – Ericsson)
  • Monitoring Gerrit (Doug Kelly – Garmin)
  • Browsing Repository Content with Gerrit’s REST API (Simon Kaegi – IBM)
  • Gerrit@LibreOffice (David Ostrovsky – LibreOffice)
  • Gerrit plugins made easy with Scripting (Luca Milanesio – GerritForge)
  • The Angular revolution in Gerrit! (Dariusz Luksza – CollabNet)

The day 1 would end with a very interesting Q&A with the Gerrit User Community about the features they would like to see coming up in the next forthcoming releases!

Day 2 – Saturday 22nd of March

  • 2014 Roadmap (Shawn Pearce – Gerrit project founder, Google)
  • Gerrit@SAP (Edwin Kempin – Gerrit Code Review maintainer – SAP)
  • Integrating CLA and Origin checks with Gerrit (Denis Roy – Eclipse Foundation)
  • Guiding Diffy to the Enterprise land (Dariusz Luksza, Eryk Szymanski – CollabNet)
  • Collaboration at Scale: The Openstack CI toolbox (Khai Do – HP)
  • Gerrit or GitHub? Take Both! (Luca Milanesio – GerritForge)
  • Diffy gets Enterprise grade (Dariusz Luksza, Eryk Szymanski – CollabNet)
  • Continuous Development with Gerrit (Tyler Jewell & Luca Milanesio – Codenvy & GerritForge)

The day 2 will end with a meet-up with food and drinks sponsored and organised by Codenvy where the Gerrit Community can discuss and exchange their post-Summit impressions and ideas on the future of Code Review.

It is going to be again a huge leap forward for the Code Review community and the Git and Gerrit projects improvement !

Continuous Development with GerritForge and Codenvy

Posted on by
Reply

On March 22nd, come see Codenvy CEO Tyler Jewell and Gerritforge CEO Luca Milanesio present at Google’s HQ in Mountain View, CA. They’ll cover Codenvy’s continuous delivery system for integrating code reviews, git, and SAAS developer environments in order to eliminate waste in the development workflow.

[…]

Read the full story at Codenvy Blog
[by Eric Cavazos]

More capacity and performance for GerritHub.io

Posted on by
Reply

We are pleased to announce that we have successfully completed a new major hardware upgrade to the GerritHub.io platform.

What has been upgraded on GerritHub.io ?

There is a brand new production cluster which provides:

  • More memory (up to 32 GBytes per node)
  • More disk-space (up to 2TBytes per node)
  • More concurrency (up to 8 CPUs per node)

The new cluster is geolocated in Germany / Bayern and provides a much better and stable bandwith.

Do I need to change anything on my client ?

GerritHub.io is accessible from the old and the new IP addresses:

  • old IP address: 94.23.71.44
  • new IP address: 148.251.77.70

The GerritHub DNS is currently propagating the new IP to gerrithub.io and review.gerrithub.io hostnames: during the propagaton time (max 24h) both IPs will provide the same access to the Germany based production cluster.

What about my Git/SSH access ?

When using Git over SSH, the remote host SSH key is exchanged and associated to the resolved remote IP into ~/.ssh/known_hosts file in your local machine. This means that you have currently associated the GerritHub.io SSH public key to the 94.23.71.44 (old IP address).

When the DNS propagation will be completed, you will see a warning from your SSH client asking to verify that the new IP address is OK. In some cases you may be asked to verify and re-accept the SSH public key.

Example of the warning you would probably see on your Git client over SSH:

Warning: Permanently added the RSA host key for IP address '[148.251.77.70]:29418' to the list of known hosts.

Double-check that the IP address shown corresponds to the new GerritHub.io cluster (148.251.77.70). This warning will be displayed only once and then the new IP will be stored in your ~/.ssh/known_hosts file.

GerritHub: code review for GitHub private repositories – early access

Posted on by
2

Support for GitHub private repositories is making substantial progress: we are proud to announce that the first milestone has been completed and is available for early access.

By using GerritHub on top of your existing GitHub private repositories, you can now define a safer set of commit policies and prevent Git forced pushes on a per-branch basis.

What is exactly GerritHub private repository support ?

With GitHub you can share code with other people and collaborate with the community of developers using public Git repositories on the Web. Your code is public by default and readable by anyone on the Web. This is the most typical case of using GitHub for the development of OpenSource projects.

However sometimes you want to restrict the access to your repository to a limited set of people or teams. Your code is not accessible to anonymous users but only the people you have selected from your GitHub Team security panel. This is typically the scenario of using GitHub for a private business or organisation.

How can GerritHub support private GitHub repositories ?

GerritHub is a public instance of Gerrit Code Review, which provides highly customisable  sofisticated security. Whilst right now all GerritHub projects have shared a common public polity for all projects, you can customise your Gerrit project security and further restrict or extends the default permissions.

What are the benefits of GerritHub on private GitHub repositories ?

By using Gerrit Code Review on top of GitHub private repositories you can improve the security, collaboration and visibility of changes in your development team:

  • Provide a common dashboard with all pending changes on a per-project basis
  • Define validation rules for code to be merged, based on quality, scoring and build validation results
  • Notify people on what is happening on the project’s code
  • Define fine-grained permissions on a per-branch basis
  • Limit collateral damage by blocking accidental force-push on release branches

How can I get early access to GerritHub for private repositories ?

GerritHub for private repositories is FREE for the initial 30 days of early access: it would then be charged at 25% of your GitHub private subscription fee. This means that starting from the 3rd of April 2014 if you are paying  $48/year on your GitHub personal plan, the GerritHub would cost only $12/year.

In order to switch to GerritHub private plan, you need to perform the following steps:

  1. Clear your browser cookies and cache
  2. Login to GerritHub.io using this url:
    https://review.gerrithub.io/login?scope=scopesPrivate
  3. Accept the GitHub modify authorisation screen: you will be requested to grant full access to your GitHub personal profile and public/private repositories
  4. Confirm your GitHub password

How can I import my private GitHub repositories ?

Once you logged in with a private scope in GerritHub, the full list of organisations and repositories are available on your import screen.

You can access the GitHub import screen by choosing the “GitHub” top-menu and “Repositories” entry,
or visit the URL https://review.gerrithub.io/plugins/github-plugin/static/repositories.html

How can I customise my private repository security on GerritHub ?

You are free to use Gerrit Code Review security configuration screen on your imported private repositories, using the “Projects” top-menu, inserting your project name on the search box and select your project. The security configuration is available on the “Access” menu. Alternatively you can access the screen directly using the URL https://review.gerrithub.io/#/admin/projects/organisation/repository,access, where organisation is your username or organisation and repository is your GitHub repository name.

Where can I find more information Gerrit Code Review security and review rules ?

Gerrit Code Review on-line documentation at https://review.gerrithub.io/Documentation/access-control.html provides a very detailed set of information useful for customising your projects security.

Alternatively if you would like a more gradual and descriptive step-by-step guide, the “Learning Gerrit Code Review” book at http://gerrithub.io/book available on Amazon provides an easy and accessible introduction to code review and security.

This is cool, but how can I provide feedback ?

GerritHub is nothing more than Gerrit Code Review plus a collection of selected plugins, including the GitHub integration plugin (see http://www.packtpub.com/article/using-gerrit-with-github). You are welcome to subscribe to the Gerrit mailing list at https://groups.google.com/d/forum/repo-discuss‎ and to the GitEnterprise blog at http://gitenterprise.me.

Comments, suggestions and hints are more than welcome !

What about Enterprise Support with guaranteed SLA on problems and incidents ?

GerritForge Enterprise Support on Gerrit Code Review covers the GerritHub cloud usage on private repositories as well. If you need guaranteed SLA you choose from one of the currently available support plans at http://gerritforge.com/support.

 

GerritHub.io is back on-line

Posted on by
Reply

Dear GerritHub.io users,
thank you for your patience, the service is up and running again.

We are currently working to increase the capacity of the service, based on the increasing audience received. Additionally we are working to increase the security and provide an active failover on multiple geo-localised IPs: once the service will be available you will be notified on GitEnterprise.me and on Twitter @gitenterprise.

GerritForge Support Team

GerritHub.io temporarily unavailable

Posted on by
Reply

Dear GerritHub.io users,
because of unexpected maintenance activity not dependant on our will, the GerritHub.io service is not accessible at the moment.

Your data is always safe and replicated in real-time to GitHub, including your code under review. Should you need urgently to access your source files you can access them through your GitHub repository associated.

Example:
GerritHub URL => https://review.gerrithub.io/mylogin/myproject.git
GitHub    URL => https://github.com/mylogin/myproject.git

We are  speeding-up the maintenance activity in order to bring the service back on-line as soon as possible: we do apologise for any inconvenience caused by this temporary disruption.

GerritForge Support Team

 

Gerrit User Summit 2014 talks proposals

Posted on by
Reply

The list of talks proposed for the next forthcoming Gerrit User Summit in Mountain View has been published.

There are very interesting talks on ideas, extensions and case studies from large enterprises and projects: it is going to again an exciting rendez-vous for all of those interested in SCM, SDLC and Continuous Agile.

See below a distilled summary of the proposed topics:

  • Using Gerrit and Jenkins together for the LibreOffice OpenSource Project
  • How to manage and monitor Gerrit using JavaMelody
  • Extend the GitHub fork & pull-request model using Gerrit Code Review lifecycle and GerritHub.io
  • Extending Gerrit with scripting plugins (Groovy, Jython and Scala)
  • Continuous Development and Code Review with Codenvy
  • Large scale Gerrit installations with testimonials from OpenStack, Yahoo and Ericsson !
  • Integrating and using Gerrit in the Enterprise with CollabNet TeamForge
  • … and new talks are coming over !

Seats are running out quickly but there are still spaces available: you can register now for free to the Gerrit User Summit event:

See you soon at the Gerrit User Summit 2014 !

Gerrit User Conference / Summit – 21-22 Mar 2014

Posted on by
Reply

Yesterday Shawn Pearce, Gerrit Code Review project founder, has announced the 4th Gerrit User Conference [+ 7th Hackathon] and Summit at GooglePlex in Mountain View – CA.

The interest in Gerrit Code Review is growing, possibly because of the increase of the Git adoption in the OpenSource and Enterprise and consequently the need of a set of best-practices on how to effectively manage a Git workflow when teams are growing: we do expect many new attendees this year !

Key information for the conference

Dates: Friday and Saturday March 21st-22nd, 2014

Location: GooglePlex – Mountain View, CA

Registration: Pre-registration is required, space is limited and registration is first-come, first serve. You can register NOW using the Application Form

Have something to share and present in a talk ?

Talks are open and you can submit your proposal using the Talk Proposal Form. We are expecting again the Gerrit plugins, scalability and the new UX to play an important role in the conference. Share your experience and how you managed to integrate the Code Review process in your Team !

Hope to see many of you at the Conference in March 2014.