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Comment by marinintim | Hacker News Reader

All these ideas like "let's fetch our deps directly from github" sound good until github is not down.

Yeh it's definitely preferable to have one of the two developers your small startup can probably afford spending a good portion of their time rolling out, securing and maintaining your own infrastructure

Yeh cos those are two only two options available. Good thinking.

GitHub is not meant for distributing dependencies. Maven Central on the other hand is, the difference being that it is mirrored and if repo1.maven.org goes down, it's not a big deal and your project can still be built and deployed.

.. until they become a target of a DDoS.

Also, if GitHub is down you can still fetch your dependencies from somewhere else.

You have not understood the concept of 'mirrored'.

Well I guess all mirrors could get targeted. Also, what stops github from getting mirrors themselves?

An internal GitLab install isn't that time consuming to maintain. Also: dat false dichotomy.

False dilemma much? Private versions of most dependency repos exist (npm, maven, etc)

You have to fetch them from somewhere. If you are fetching deps from multiple sources, there is a much higher chance of at least one source being down.

You can fetch them. Once, then cache them

As well you could if fetching from Github?

Not being able to fetch one is just as bad as not being able to fetch all.

That was my point.

That applies to an in-house solution as well.

Inhouse DDoS seems less likely though, at least ;)

Sure, but I didn't specifically mean DDoS attacks, more of the human error kind. People tend to be more trigger happy with changes when it's "only" an internal system.

This was a controversial/contentious statement during the last DDOS attack. I wonder if any minds have changed.

I'd venture to say that more downtime occurs via local issues (Internet, hardware, virus) than Github.

Or "let's move our entire business workflow to github!". Doh! This is why you should run indefero/srchub/gitlab or any of the other self hosted source code control apps.

I would argue from personal experience there's almost the same (or higher) likelihood of internal sources going down for other reasons since most people's IT departments aren't as efficient as GitHub's.

For most, the cost of setting up and maintaining those systems than they lose when Github is down.

It all depends on your infrastructure.

I once worked in a group that used SVN for SCM, mediawiki for wiki and Trac for tickets. I voiced my opinion about that setup many times but management felt that was the most efficient way to work...

Products like indefero/srchub have all of that from a single interface and it's very easy to maintain. I don't know how easy gitlab is to install/maintain - perhaps sytse can pop in and go into detail about that. Assuming the system works the maintenance would be minimal.

You called me :) Anyway, installing GitLab should take under 5 minutes on a fresh Ubuntu 14.04 server with https://about.gitlab.com/downloads/

And then you can set a daily nightly cron for: sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install gitlab-ce

Don't forget to take snapshots of your server for backups.

> And then you can set a daily nightly cron for: sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install gitlab-ce

AHHHH!!!! Don't recommend doing that. Only those who are crazy do that. Imagine waking up in the morning and your SCM system is broken due to an update that was automatically applied - I wouldn't want a sysadmin (or developer) to see that before their first cup of coffee.

When you update - does it automatically apply migrations or other database upgrades that might be necessary?

For the reason mentioned it is better to set the timing during the day (that is what we do). But if you upgrade automatically during the day you'll have a bit of downtime during the day.

By default the Omnibus packages will stop, run migrations, and start again, no matter how “big” or “small” the upgrade is. The behaviour can be changed by adding a /etc/gitlab/skip-auto-migrations file.

Obviously if you installation grows you can review the needed upgrades in advance and prevent downtime in most cases.

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