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Comment by LyndsySimon | Hacker News Reader

I started a new project recently, and put it on Gitlab instead of GitHub. I'm very pleased so far, and have been finding reasons to justify encouraging others to move projects there as well.

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I'm very glad to hear that. What are the reasons that you think will encourage others?

First and foremost for me are protected branches. For everywhere I've worked, giving someone commit access to the main repository means giving them the ability to rewrite history on the release branch as well. GitLab solves that nicely by allowing committers to append only to protected branches by default.

I'm also warming to the idea of treating CI as "pipelines", and find myself thinking of tooling more in that way.

GitHub has that too, I noticed the other day. I still think Gitlab is much better, and use it by default for everything new, but fair's fair :P

I love the integrated CI, though, and the use cases it enables. I love that I can just make a pipeline that lints, tests and compiles my code and then, if all of those pass, ends with deploying it to production.

There are many more Gitlab features I like a lot, and the fact that they're all integrated is icing on the cake.

It took forever for GitHub to get protected branches. It was quite frustrating. Glad they finally have it though.

It took forever for GitHub to get anything, until Gitlab lit a fire under their ass. GitHub were perfectly content just resting on their laurels while every essential feature was handled by a different $15/mo third party service.

Cool, thanks for that. As others noted GitHub recently also introduced protected branches. As for CI pipeline we got some great multiproject functionality coming in a few months https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/22558#note_25...

The biggest thing I think would encourage more projects to move is improving discoverability. On Github, I can very easily search for new projects to contribute to, and their Explore page [1] is very nice. Gitlab's, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have a way to browse by category like Github.

For everything else, I like Gitlab a lot -- it seems to have the best integration of tools of any code host.

[1]: https://github.com/explore

I completely agree. Actually, I think Github could do a better job with discovery too. The Explore page is a decent start, but why don't I get personalized recommendations for new projects?

Yes, that would be nice -- look at the languages my code is written in or the categories my code is, it makes sense to suggest new projects based on that.

I recently setup a small personal project on Gitlab as well. I've been very impressed. I was able to setup a private repo, with a CI setup that builds my code and runs my tests every time i push a commit.. all on their servers. For free.

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