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GitHub down

github.com

266 pointsdustinmoris187 comments

Just recently I thought to myself "it has been a long time since I saw the Github Unicorn". As it turns out, I didn't really miss it at all.

Regarding the centralized nature of Github: it is the centralized communication that is a problem, not the ability to share code. I can easily send a patch to somebody on my team, but that doesn't help me review a PR, reply to comments, trigger a CI build, or initiate a deploy.

Code sharing is only a small part of what a team relies on Github for.

There is a decentralized review system based on Git. Take a look here: https://github.com/google/git-appraise ...oh, wait...

Further I think these are things that are generally harder to decentralize. I'm not sure how much marginal value there is doing so.

Yup. Half the comments in this thread are "oh you could do issues in git or something." No, when my PM asks me if bug 123 is fixed, I want a single source of truth. Whether that truth is GitHub, JIRA or something else, it's still a single point of failure.

Maybe the best way would be to put those wiki/issue/whatever-data in the repository itself and just build tools to throw at them. This could be github, gitlab or something local.

Back when hurricane Sandy took out my employer's upstream Mercurial server for several days straight, I was pretty chuffed to be able to tell my boss, "You know how we migrated to a new source control system a couple months ago? Well, thanks to that, we can keep working pretty much uninterrupted. We should double check that XXX is getting frequent offsite backups, though."

My current company uses a self-hosted option, so this doesn't affect me. But I can't help but think that this time it's different, and we'd be hosed. The git part would still work without too much hassle, but we are heavily dependent on a bunch of additional things that GitHub offers, such as the pull request interface. That's slightly worrisome, I suppose.

All that said, I want to steer clear of knee-jerk assuming, "We don't have this problem b/c we self-host." There's a sickening sense of not really being in control of your own fate when a cloud provider goes down, but, realistically, I wouldn't be the person in charge of getting one of our self-hosted services back up, either. What really matters is % downtime. My experience has been that, compared to many in-house IT departments, folks like GitHub are generally very good at keeping the lights on.

While I don't necessarily agree with it, the argument is that with a self hosted solution, you have more control over when you are doing things.

So if you have a really busy time coming up, you don't deploy the new git update that day, you wait until you would be okay with some downtime.

Is it just me or is the new GitHub Status page a joke? It used to show historical charts for uptime and latency for each of the different services, which was actually useful. Now it is just a daily messages list.

Yes, I noticed that too. I wonder when the charts got removed.

The Wayback Machine suggests it was 13th September 2017: [1] (from 17:50:53 GMT) has graphs, but [2] (from 20:06:33 GMT) is a 302 redirect to the messages page.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170913175053/https://status.gi...

[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170913200633/https://status.gi...

Now the status page is updated, but the status on previous days are all saying "The status is still red at the beginning of the day"

I saw that, too, and was fairly concerned. A smoothly running, quality focused engineering organization doesn't leave a status page un-updated for 3+ weeks...

Also, "reports of service unavailability"? I would expect monitoring tools to be screaming...

They had an outage happening a few days ago, and I happened to be looking at the status page. It appeared that days in the past were just showing the current status. It went orange, all days past went orange. I refreshed again, it went red, all days past went red.

Probably a quick update just to get the current downtime on the page.

It is only a matter of time before someone here suggests you use self hosted gitlab/github enterprise. Ain't got time for that.

Time allocated for this used to be a given. It's interesting how quickly we have moved to SaaS.

Though if your internal IT team had a VCS outage, it wouldn't be Hacker News news. Really it is just the scope of the outages (and commiseration) that has changed.

a) SaaS companies often have the resources / domain knowledge to provide a superior service to the self-hosted alternative

b) Outages are inevitable and if you're using a SaaS you get to blame someone else for it (and sometimes it gets resolved quicker)

Yeah, merely an observation, not a criticism of SaaS.

However I do wonder sometimes, even with the resources and domain knowledge, if the super crazy scale these SaaS companies have to deal with tips the scales to be about the same reliability as a solid internal ops or IT team (who only have to worry about YOUR scale).

Is it so absurd that some people would want a service they use on a daily basis to be stable?

That is why self hosting is not the best solution.

Actually, that's exactly why self hosting is the best solution.

only if you don't understand what you're doing.

You nearly had me there.

Its actually not that much work. You definitely got time for that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16124595

From twitter: http://classicprogrammerpaintings.com/post/144953638470/gith...

If all goes belly up there is always Software Heritage (https://www.softwareheritage.org/).

Is this like https://web.archive.org/ for software?

Aims to be, yes. Early stages still, but it's well-supported by a number of institutions, funders, governments even.

https://status.github.com/messages has more info.

Reposting this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16124702) as top-level comment, because I think it is worth it:

The git-dit project (https://github.com/neithernut/git-dit) provides a distributed issue tracking functionality inside git.

It does this without cluttering the repository with unneeded files, gives the possibility for having tree-like conversation (including merging conversations), referencing issues, linking to commits and so on. It is even possible to host the issues in another repository as the code (if that is wanted) or having one repository of issues for several projects / moving issues from one repository to another.

There is only a CLI as of today. I hear that there is some effort on building a (view-only) web frontend for it, though I don't know much about its progress. Maybe asking the maintainer would be an idea.

What's also missing is a way to give users of the tool access to a repository where they can submit issues (which then could also be used by a web/gui frontend for the tool). This is not the domain of git-dit itself, but a solution needs to be found. One idea would be a publish repo (where everyone can push) which automatically does some sanity-verification on the issues and forwards them to the maintainers repository... or something like that. Also integration/mappers to/from other services (gitlab, github) are missing and so is mail->git-dit integration (posting issues from a mailinglist automagically into the issues repository).

Also, https://github.com/vitiral/artifact/ is a really nice tool to do planning of an application or library inside a git repository. I am currently starting using it in imag (https://imag-pim.org) and it is really wonderful. The author currently does a reimplementation of its core functionality to make it even more powerful.

More generally, here's one of the best discussions of distributed issue tracking I've found (dated 2013): http://travisbrown.ca/blog.html#TooMuchAboutDistributedBugTr...

:/ even the status page is broken

"The status is still red at the beginning of the day"

If the stars align and Stack Overflow goes down too, I can just go home.

You can use the cached version from Google.

Apparently the status has been "red" every day since December 1st: https://status.github.com/messages/2017-12-07

"The status is still red at the beginning of the day"

Yesterday was the first "normal" day, before this outage.

The status page is broken, it was mostly green 10 minutes ago.

They should provide a status page for the status page.

That was different before. They likely changed some historic data when they put the current issue online. Probably just pushed out a quick update.

Yeah I bet these guys will have this fixed in no time. If you manage your own instance you are bound to have a less entertaining landing page when it breaks.

I've worked on numerous enterprise git servers - they all inevitably go down for at least a half day every 6-9 months.

Again, the GitHub is down for 5 minutes and everyone rushes the "who will post first on HN" thing.

I don't get it.

Fake Internet Points at stake + a lot of engineers sitting around with nothing to do = spam HN.

I think it's back up.

Status page apparently isn't automatic because it is yet to be updated.

Is that better or worse than stripe who updates their status page saying something is wrong all of the time and then just changes it back without noting any problem in the history? I get alerts on them 4-5x/week and only maybe one of those winds up as a colored entry in the history.

...and sure enough, shortly after writing this it was 'down' for 10 minutes and came back up with the status page saying nothing about it.

Seems that it is automatically generated, though, because it's now "The status is still red at the beginning of the day" all over.

Has been done now. https://status.github.com/messages.

While I kind of hate Atlassian products (bloated, horrible APIs), and Bitbucket has some serious UX problems (Find), it's still better than have your repos be offline.

There's not much that can go wrong on a single instance with a local database. Have a failover in case the HW fails and you are good to go, and it's faster. The pricing is not great, but perhaps that's something GitLab can solve.

But being hip and being lean (even if it costs more) is more important I guess.

Did you actually notice that BitBucket was down yesterday for several hours and still has huge issues?

I think GP was referring to the fact that bitbucket.org-the-website is just the Atlassian-hosted installation of BitBucket-the-Atlassian-product, which you can also self-host and self-administrate.

It is payware, but reasonably affordable ($10/10 users, usually).

I've seen companies squeeze some (probably contract-breaching) huge numbers of users out of the very small plans of Atlassian software, as well, usually via insane multiple-people-using-same-account editing conventions.

> to the fact that bitbucket.org-the-website is just the Atlassian-hosted installation of BitBucket-the-Atlassian-product, which you can also self-host and self-administrate.

Nope. They're completely separate things.

The hosted one they bought, and does mercurial too.

The self hosted one is what used to be called stash, and is git only afaik.

GitHub also has an enterprise version analogous (AIUI) to running Bitbucket or GitLab locally: https://enterprise.github.com/home

Ah, good point, I forgot about this.

Isn't Gitlab at least as hip as Github?

GitLab is actually better than GitHub, and not just because it can be self hosted.

Not a Bitbucket user, but this surprises me given the seemingly constant downtime issues that plagued Hipchat when I used it on a regular basis, but maybe it was just isolated to that one product.

BitBucket was down most of yesterday

See my reply to nik736's comment in this subthread: bitbucket.org is just Atlassian's copy of BitBucket, which you can buy from them and hose yourself.

EDIT: I meant "host", not "hose", but given some of my experience sysadminning Atlassian products, the sentence may still be correct.

> bitbucket.org is just Atlassian's copy of BitBucket, which you can buy from them and hose yourself.

This is incorrect. Bitbucket Cloud and Server are two completely separate codebases. On the other hand, GitHub Enterprise is basically a snapshot of the production GitHub application.

Interesting, thanks for the info. I had assumed BitBucket cloud was a selected distribution of mostly the same components as BitBucket Server, plus a few proprietary things they don't sell in the hosted version.

No problem. Atlassian actually acquired Bitbucket in 2010 and then released Stash (later rebranded as Bitbucket Server) in 2012.

Git blame --help

Should be the name of a movie.

"How will the world's hackers react when their source code goes offline? GitHub Down, watch it now!"

We know how they react. It's the same reaction as when their chat rooms go off-line. (-:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16109735

Self-hosted vs SaaS is not a binary decision, and I hate seeing it argued like that every time there's an outage.

What the hell happened to basic risk mitigation? Offsite backups, disaster procedures, etc aren't new, or unexpected. You'd think they should be the norm, if you're a working professional...

It's back up for me.

It's been only 7 minutes and I already noticed it (outside of HN), we rely too much on github :P

It was 8 minutes and the stroy was already running in HN, checked it before status.github.com even. We rely too much on HN :P

I guess I'm going out for a walk in the park (without my phone), we rely too much on computers :P

This is why I mirror all my GitHub repos with GitLab. Redundancy FTW.

That's the moment when you know why you're using a decentralized version control system. You don't care about the central server.

Until you need to PR a change to get it to production.

If you can't merge to master decentrally, that's not Git's fault.

GitHub just wants to show off their Unicorn artwork.

I refreshed a page and boom ... . Check status, but that was not updated yet. Friday is coming sooner! :)

Why do they even have a status page if it shows nothing and was updated "a day ago"...

It’s been on Hacker News for two minutes. Your reply is one minute ago. Perhaps you should check your SLA with GitHub, but presumably it doesn’t say that 60 second delays is the same as the status page being effectively useless.

Also, it was updated by the time you posted your reply...

I mean, no system is perfect. Maybe their status page only queries their site every 5 minutes? Give them a break.

As of 7:20AM PST, it's on there. So it took them 4 whole minutes since this thread was created to get it on there. That's pretty good response.

Status page updated. I guess they wait a few minutes to reduce false positives.

It's updated now.

They're taking a page out of AWS' playbook :D

Anyone know specifics? They handled that DDoS attack really well not too long ago ...

So happy I moved our dev team to Gitea earlier this year. Already paying dividends!

This is why you don't rely on third parties for your build dependencies!

This is why it pays to host your own source repositories. It is kind of shocking that many people with the skills and means are too cheap to host their own. I personally could not risk github deleting my repositories or (in this case) going down for any length of time.

Though in an alternate universe where somebody's self-hosted server went down in flames (possibly literally), one could just as easily say:

This is why it pays to have your own source repositories in the cloud. It is kind of shocking that many people with the awareness and means are too cheap to pay for a GitHub private repo. I personally could not risk a careless sysadmin deleting my repositories or (in this case) going down for any length of time.

The obvious answer is to have both, but smooth synchronization isn't always easy or even available.

You seem to be assuming that your self-hosted git will be more bullet-proof than GitHub. It probably won't be. You'll probably have fewer nines than they do; it's their business, after all.

Even if your own solution had better uptime, you still haven't shown that it's worth it. GitHub is far more than just a git repo on a server.

First, yes it is more bullet-proof. We had 100% uptime last year with our GitLab.

Second, it is completely worth it. GitLab is better than GitHub, so that definitely makes it worth it.

Interesting, maybe I've been too dismissive of GitLab.

The problem is that if you spin up a GitLab in DO or Linode, there is a chance that your VM will get lost due to hardware failure. You also need to manage backups and stuff.

I'm right there with you, but it doesn't make sense for small teams. Once you get past a point, it starts to make sense to self-host some stuff.

Is there a managed hosting provider that would host all this stuff for you? Like, say "I need GitLab, Jira, Active Directory, and X, Y, Z" and they come back with "$XXX/month for 10 users"?

You can select all of this in Azure. You can also enable availability sets to reduce hardware failure risk.

Ooh. That I did not know.

I don't worry about Github deleting my stuff. Every single developer has a copy of all of the repos they work on. Delete it from Github and any one of us can just push it somewhere else. That's one of the great things about git.

Them going down is still a problem if you're using Github as part of your daily development or deployment process, of course.

Eh, self hosting stuff is a hassle and I'd be willing to bet most people are more concerned about the time/reliability than the cost.

I use gh pages for the static parts of my own site even though I have a web server (which I use for quickly sharing files and whatnot) because GitHub is less likely to leave things broken than I am.

I don't need the free time right now :( Time to get a coffee.

Now we should start a "Developer-0" kind of thing.... the guy who screw up that shit deserves a second chance... maybe a promotion...

what is this, facebook?!?

Gitlab did something like that not too long ago.

Looks like it is back up

Aaaand it's back.

already looking forward to the post-mortem on this one :)

And we're back

... and there are queues for all ping pong tables around the globe.

Is there any relation with bitbucket shutdown few days ago?

Where is GitHub hosted?

Back up now!

We centralized a decentralized version control system.

$2 billion to the first person to draft a decentralised git coin WhitePaper

I think you just did.

No. We need a proper whitepaper explaining how to make GitHub decentralized with blockchain tokenization using distributed smart-contracts. ;)

(Did I forget any important buzzword?)

It exist! Not a whitepaper, but at least a Medium article: https://medium.com/@alexberegszaszi/mango-git-completely-dec.... Ethereum + IPFS/Swarm as backend for Git.

Source code is currently unavailable as it is hosted on ... drum roll ... GitHub: https://github.com/axic/mango.

Insufficient Dogfood.

Now that it's up you can see:

  This repository is also available on Mango at mango://{...}

You nailed it for the devs but you gotta' say it to people who would pay for it too.

Decentralized GitHub would synergistically leverage our existing cloud infrastructure to provide unprecedented collaboration that is open, robust, efficient, and focused.

Did I forget any important buzzword?

Nah, but you could always add some Serverless and Lambada to make it more Agile.

"crypto" baiting is like the funniest trend ever in the Stock Market lately.

Kodak is riding that pony home ... (noting I live in Buffalo, just down the road from Kodak's home turf in Rochester and I'm a pretty avid photographer - http://www.instagram.com/crispyfotos/).

"Did I forget any important buzzword?"

BigDataDeepLearning.

You got to ironically buzz to be cool today? Pretend you didnt get it, so all those d* who didnt get it can lecture you. We are deeply invested into the idea of the Seagullarity!

Blockchain is so 2017--block lattice is the future.

Actually that's the FIRST time I've ever heard of lattice. Is that a real deal? Not trying to feed into the hype here, but from a math perspective I get fascinated by concurrency

Yeah, a cryptocurrency called Rai currently uses it (maybe IOTA too?). Essentially, each account gets its own blockchain and they're connected together using a DAG data structure.

Yeah, RaiBlocks is currently the only one doing it, although you could make the case for Stellar as well.

I read this as block lettuce the first time around.

Just don't host it on Github Pages.

It's missing a sprinkle of AI.

deep-learning. AI is so 2002 (noting I, Cyborg by Kevin Warwick)

why not just use git-ssb? some gateways:

http://git-ssb.celehner.com/%25n92DiQh7ietE%2BR%2BX%2FI403LQ... http://git.scuttlebot.io/%25n92DiQh7ietE%2BR%2BX%2FI403LQoyf... http://localhost:7718/%25n92DiQh7ietE%2BR%2BX%2FI403LQoyf2Dt...

edit:fix links

(Did I forget any important buzzword?)

deep learning? VR? IoT?

Be sure to follow this template

https://i.imgur.com/W0rai6K.jpg

SIA coin is a similar concept. They even have video hosting/streaming on their development roadmap.

Decentralized storage, filesystem and social media seem to be the most valuable use–case for blockchains aside from the inherent value of cryptocurrency.

https://sia.tech/whitepaper.pdf

It's funny that there's already a Gitcoin project, however they do NOT have a token: https://gitcoin.co/

The goal of the project is to incentivize FOSS development, similar to Bountysource, except without requiring participants to trust a central party. It's pretty cool!

Gitcoin already exists :) https://gitcoin.co/

The issue is that the features we use along with git, many of which github provides, are not decentralized. The true but tired argument that git will continue to work when github goes down totally ignores this issue.

Yes, git still works. But we don't just rely on the features git provides.

So this isn't really anything to do with Git then is it? So why joke we centralised Git when really we centralised a bunch of other things that are not really anything to do with Git?

It's also the issue with git, if it goes down and you don't update your local clones ~daily (or as other mentioned don't have system in place that would allow you to update somewhat locally).

Because we also centralized git.

You can still work with your colleagues by pushing and pulling your own repos without involving GitHub.

I think centralised CI is the real problem. I don't have the compute power in my home to run our full test suite, so I can't push with confidence without my CI cluster.

Issues and other GH infrastructure is arguably a bigger problem. That metadata is locked within the Github silo with no easy way to export it elsewhere.

This is indeed the crux of the problem. I've been thinking about this a lot (and I wouldn't be surprised if it exists already), we need a decentralised method of storing issues and other things inside our git repos.

https://github.com/neithernut/git-dit provides a distributed issue tracker inside git, without cluttering the repository with unneeded files and also gives the possibility for having tree-like conversation, referencing issues and so on.

Unfortunately, no non-cli frontend exists right now (feel free to build one, shouldn't be complicated). Also some convenience is still missing, but could easily be integrated.

Also, https://github.com/vitiral/artifact/ is a really nice tool to do planning of an application or library inside a git repository. I am currently starting using it in iamg (https://imag-pim.org) and it is really wonderful. The author currently does a reimplementation of its core functionality to make it even more powerful.

If you think about it, there's no particular reasons why the metadata can't live in (and be tracked by) the repo itself.

Issues could live in /issues. Simple command-line (or GUI) tools could edit them. I'm thinking in particular of how password-store[0] makes tracking history in a git repo invisible: it Just Works™.

Discussions could live in /discussions, stored in something like RFC822 format. Again, simple CLI (or GUI, if you swing that way) tools could manipulate this easily.

A wiki can, again, live in the same repo.

PRs are a little different, since they really do need to live outside the repo. But what is a PR other than someone saying, 'hey, please pull my branch into yours'?

[0] https://www.passwordstore.org/

PRs and other things could also just live in a "shadow repo". Even if just by convention.

You have a `Product` repo and a `Product-meta` repo.

The biggest issue I have with using git as a truly decentralized system is remote management. Unless you want to be manually futzing with remotes on every single client and pushing/fetching from others correctly, you need some kind of central server.

I really think there is a hole here for a product that works with git underneath, but gives a nice easy way to manage all that complexity.

Like GitHub?

I missed a word there, I meant a "decentralized way of managing all that complexity"!

I know of at least one solution: https://bifax.org/

Great link, thanks! I've been looking for something like this.

it's an issue for issues, but wikis at least are also git repos : https://help.github.com/articles/adding-and-editing-wiki-pag...

Also, the workflow on Github is one many people like, and it differs a bit if you have to use git "the old fashioned way". Not that it's hard or impossible, but it differs. I can't imagine explaining the GitHub-less workflow to my colleges..

\*colleague.

There are several attempts at tracking issues inside a repository. What we really need to sell the concept, though, I think is one that can reasonably sync with GitHub Issues. GitHub Issues are a reasonable front end for issue reporting for casual and non-technical users and if you can interoperate with them you don't have to reinvent that basic CMS.

Every now and then I sketch ideas on the subject, but haven't yet gotten someone to pay me to build it. ;)

GitLab CI is really sweet, because you deploy your own runners (workers) whereever you want. Downside is, the control is not a standalone CI app but a part of GitLab (or I'm unaware about something).

Drone is very promising but last time I've checked the documentation had some holes in it. The website is "coming soon" and IIRC it's like this for quite a long while.

I'm unaware about any CIs that are usable with local repos. Would be neat to just run a local command and it would spawn a worker somewhere (local or through a remote coordinator) and run the tests on whatever I have in the working tree, just like it happens with centralized repo+CI combos. It's too frequent I find myself doing `git commit -m 'Fix that stupid typo in previous commit'`.

We're working on a 'CI only' mode so you can easily use GitLab CI without the rest of GitLab. This is already possible but now it requires some configuration.

For your local use case GitLab Runner has a local mode exec, although that is currently being reworked https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/issues/2797#note...

We centralized a decentralized communication system too. (eMail)

Decentralization just doesn't work too well in practice for whatever reason. Everyone is behind a NAT/firewall, everyone has low computing power, its hard to regulate, etc. This all leads to a centralized solution being easier.

I think the current best thing we have is centralized but open source and encrypted, which gets an "okay"/10 from me.

> Decentralization just doesn't work too well in practice for whatever reason.

Because it's inconvenient. Centralisation is convenient, it gives a single discovery and synchronisation point. Decentralisation makes discovery much more difficult, and requires adding separate synchronisation mechanisms. It generates friction and cognitive overhead.

Even more so for "side-services". Sure your VCS is nominally decentralised[0], but what about bug reports? Contributions? Notes & docs? There were distributed bug trackers efforts back in the early 10s but… they didn't really work IME, they were not convenient or practical.

[0] though even without a single giant point of failure, most project would still have a single canonical master copy, a really mesh/distributed contribution system is very rare (Linux's tree of integrators/forks is probably the closest?) and none of the current VCS makes mesh/point-to-point collaborations really convenient

That's kind of missing the point, everyone's git local clones are still there, I can still work on the code. Git's decentralisation is meant to make sure work doesn't stop altogether when the remote is down.

The major feature of git is that it's distributed, not that it's decentralized.

Git's got two big features over SVN:

1. Automatic, private, per-user branching. Git's even nice enough to keep the private branches out of the main repository, and lets you pretend to be the authoritative repository without creating a branch if you really want to. This is what clone/push/pull actually does, and it's what a distributed VCS really brings to the table. It lets every dev pretend to be the project manager when they're writing their own code.

2. A much improved merging model. The graph model of git is just much better than the linear model of SVN.

The second one is what people thought they wanted when they started using git. The first one is what they didn't know they wanted before they started using git.

Git gets around the problem of "Well, if we do #1, how do we know which repository is authoritative then?" by saying, "We're not solving that problem. This is an exercise for the users that's easily solved by file permissions." So by refusing to solve that (rather hard) problem, the VCS becomes internally decentralized. That doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't centrally manage your repositories or have an authoritative repository. It's just that git itself doesn't care about knowing which repository is authoritative.

The concept of an "upstream" is inherently centralized.

The point of git is that everyone can keep working right now and can push later without things getting very messy.

Welcome to the modern tech world. While you're waiting for the site to come back up, let me tell you all about my new startup, SquareWheel(TM).

edit: Oh jesus christ, there's a fucking tech company called Square Wheel. Kill me now.

Tell me more - sounds like a productive thing to work on given all productivity is gone for the immediate foreseeable future.

So you’re saying that if I put up my own Git server (for a fee), it’s likely to have better uptime statistics than GitHub?

I can’t push changes to the decentralized Git protocol, only to a (centralized) server instance.

You can email patches. This is now the Linux team works.

The code for git itself is also managed the same way (though I don't think there are any subsystems in git, unlike the kernel).

Setting up your own instance of a bit server is free.

If you want issues, CI etc... Then you need a local version of github which you will pay for.

Well... unless you use something like gitlab https://about.gitlab.com/ - which is also free, and has support for issues, CI, etc. (snap!)

Or GitLab. That's free and easy to self host.

Bingo. People think its hard to self host. Its not. They have an omnipackage that you install. You run updates. You enable the automatic backups. Problem solved!

But maintenance is where people can have issues. GitLab is complex.

Personally, I prefer something more lightweight and for some time I've been using gogs - https://github.com/gogits/gogs (so far so good)

Is gogs maintained anymore? Everyone I know switched to the community fork, gitea.

Wow, I haven't peeked at the commit history for some time. Thanks for the info!

The VCS is still decentralized (you can share code with your neighbour or across the world), it's the administration (tickets, PRs, etc) that aren't.

I think it'd be fairly straightforward for github or a competitor to store those things in git as plain markdown files, either alongside the main source code, or (as it does with GH Pages) in a separate branch (that has nothing in common with the master branch but it's still in the same repo).

Similar (maybe) is ADR (http://thinkrelevance.com/blog/2011/11/15/documenting-archit...), storing architectural decisions into numbered files in git. See also: https://github.com/npryce/adr-tools

Fedora's Pagure[1] implements those administrative bits as Git repos. Issues are stored in a Git repository along with the git repo for the code.

[1]: https://pagure.io/pagure

No way to build my npm dependencies. So the day github would really crash/lost some files, the package decency system thing is dead. That is a very exciting scenario... as exiting as if google would forget to renew google.com and would have no legal right to get it back.

Am I the only one who has project's mirror on Gitlab for exactly this purpose?

I have it the other way around. I use gitlab with github as backup.

I'm curious as to how you manage the mirror. Do you perform all operations twice (e.g. if you push to Github, do you manually push to Gitlab)?

Edit: Nvm, found out Gitlab has the mirroring feature (https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/workflow/repository_mirroring.htm...). Pretty cool!

yep.

this PSA is quite unnecessary when a problem is universally known and maximally severe.

I find it useful because I don't use github directly, but some of my software's dependencies do. It's a nice heads up, because I probably won't be checking otherwise.

Well I didn't know, not everyone uses it on a daily basis.

so is it interesting for you to know that a service you don't use daily is down for a couple hours? this random github outage happens basically every other month, and is fixed in like 30 minutes. every time it's on HN frontpage.

people who use Github will already know.

Yea ok I didn't know that either, I thought they were rather rare and worse than that.

oh look, it's up again.

This wasn't a PSA, it was "first to post grabs the karma".

Maybe it will prevent some folks from refreshing the page and possibly exacerbating the issue?

so, front page of HN is a good way of alleviating server load?

It helps to spend the time people have now that they can't use GH.

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