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.
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Read the full story at Codenvy Blog
[by Eric Cavazos]
We are pleased to announce that we have successfully completed a new major hardware upgrade to the GerritHub.io platform.
There is a brand new production cluster which provides:
The new cluster is geolocated in Germany / Bayern and provides a much better and stable bandwith.
GerritHub.io is accessible from the old and the new IP addresses:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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:
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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:
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 !
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 !
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
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.
When searching on Google with the keywords “Gerrit” and “GitHub” you find lots of different links with more questions than answers; see below a selection of the most interesting ones:
And additionally Linus Torvalds, the father of the Git version control, whilst keeping the Kernel source on GitHub, expressed explicitly in his own way what he thinks about Pull Requests.
Google decided to use a different tool than GitHub and developed Gerrit Code Review for managing the community effort of developing the Android Operating System, mainly for two reasons:
There are for sure additional reasons why even today and even if GitHub would decide to become OpenSource in the future a long set of features that GitHub would be needed in order to support a large-scale cooperative project !
What is Gerrit Code Review today ?
Today Gerrit is much more than the Android OS review tool ! There are around 80 contributors growing over time and from both large industries and OpenSource projects. SAP, Sony Mobile and Qualcomm IC are amongst the most active companies contributing to the tool whilst from the OpenSource community there are LibreOffice, Openstack and Wikimedia.
What is the right choice then ? red pill or blue pill ? Open or commercial ?
We thought about the problem very deeply at GerritForge.com as some of our customers decided to completely quit GitHub, mainly for security and confidentiality reasons but others moved into the opposite direction as well embracing GitHub:Enterprise.
In a nutshell the criteria that drove those customers into one (GitHub) or another direction (Gerrit Code Review) were based on the following aspects.
Security.
High availability.
Usability.
Scalability
(*) Note from Shawn Pearce on this topic: “Its just crazy slow per object, the C implementation discovers around 70k objects/second. 3M objects takes 42 seconds at best, the truth is the rate of new object discovery slows as it goes further back in history, which is why counting 3M objects takes modern machines minutes. GitHub has tried porting the bitmap code to C. Its running in some limited cases on their site, at one time https://github.com/torvalds/linux/ had it enabled. We haven’t seen updated patches for it, and it looks like its disabled again.”
Code Review
Why not using Gerrit and GitHub together ?
This is not a new idea as it has been proposed and successfully implemented by some popular OpenSource projects such as:
The benefits of using both tools are twofold.
From the features and performance perspective the projects can benefit from the Gerrit JGit engine and associated Code Review capabilities. Gerrit Code Review model may seem less friendly than GitHub’s Pull Request but eventually generates a more readable and maintainable code-history, essential for long-term products in production.
From the point of view of accessibility and social community, the fact of using GitHub allows WikiMedia and Openstack to have an extended reach and at the same time even off-load all the clone traffic to GitHub nodes instead of their Gerrit servers !
Why GerritHub ? What is the value added by the platform ?
We thought about creating GerritHub about 2 years ago, when we first discussed with Kohsuke Kawaguchi, the adoption of Gerrit for the Jenkins Continuous Integration project. He liked Gerrit at first sight when he joined the Git Together in 2011 @Mountain View but at the same time he was concerned about the loss of reach and ease of use of GitHub.
The integration between the two tools was technical possible but challenging and needed some significant set of Gerrit skills to be implemented correctly, including the integration between the Pull Request model and the Gerrit Code Reviews.
GerritHub is the first Gerrit-powered platform that offers the best of Gerrit 2.8 (current master release) integrated with GitHub SSO (using OAuth 2.0) and replicated to GitHub repositories and Pull Requests. Differently from the WikiMedia and Openstack implementations, it is a self-service platform and anyone who has a GitHub account and repositories can self-register at GerritHub and use it for its own OpenSource projects !
Summary.
There is no winner in the battle between GitHub and Gerrit because they are simply different tools for different audiences. There are cases where the needs are mixed and both can provide a valid platform for the purpose of the projects.
Gerrit has been historically a niche tool, confined to the Android OS development: now things are different and major OpenSource projects adopted it as standard. However the need of a “public GitHub presence” was needed and has been implemented.
GerritHub gives you the choice of taking and using the best of both !
Learn more about Gerrit Code Review and GerritHub.
Gerrit Code Review home:
http://code.google.com/p/gerrit/
One-click sign-In and auto-registration to GerritHub:
https://review.gerrithub.io/login
Book about Gerrit Code Review:
http://gerrithub.io/book
GitHub is finally back, after 4h of outage because of a DDoS attack: we can all come back to push changes and the Continuous Integration Engine (e.g. Jenkins) will start building again.
The problem is: how much money you have lost in those 4h of outage ? 50 Developers at $500/day would have costed over over $12,000 … can your Business cope with that risk again and associated losses ?
Having another mirror, a spare wheel either on-premises or on the Cloud, would cost nothing and allow you to limit your costs in case of another GitHub outage ! Give a try to http://gerrithub.io or install Gerrit Code Review on your premises and protect your Development Team.
This morning GitHub is down again, not the first time unfortunately !
If you want to keep using GitHub but NOT being blocked when it is down, you can use Gerrit Code Review replication for having an always up-to-date replica. With the GitHub plugin, your accounts and repositories are always in synch and can be used for failover.
Read how to use GitHub and Gerrit Code Review on http://www.packtpub.com/article/using-gerrit-with-github
If you want to use Gerrit with GitHub on the Cloud, register today at http://gerrithub.io and next time that GitHub will be down, you will not be affected.
GerritForge Blog 