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Comment by SahAssar | Hacker News Reader

Why would I use this instead of a pure ssh storage service like rsync.net? Because of per-repo keys?

Mostly because you have or anticipate having git-specific needs other than backups, like having a central collaboration point as part of your git workflows. You can use gitern like a backup service, but that is a subset of what is intended.

(I don't use that rsync service so I'm just guessing as to how you use it. If you can provide more context, I might be able to help further.)

At the moment, the feature set around git workflows is not more than just providing authorized access for several users to a git repo itself but I'll be providing more features around this soon in a way that improves on what currently exists on git hosts.

I think the point is not about backups. It is really, really easy to set up a remote git repository. Everything is nicely documented in chapter 4 of Pro Git [1]. Because a git remote is nothing more than a plain directory, you could serve a git repo anywhere you could store files, even on your own disks.

If multiple people need push access to a private repository, just serve a central repository as on a VPS and use SSH for authentication. I am not sure if there is a reason to use a third party hosting service for this, especially when hosting private repos.

[1]: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-Getting-Git...

> just serve a central repository as on a VPS and use SSH for authentication

Reminds me of this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Edit: I don't mean to dismiss your comment. I just mean to say I'm obviously comfortable doing what you described but it's not a trivial amount of effort even if it is conceptually straightforward.

It's a little bit of work, but really it's surprising how well Git works with the dumbest servers. I run a number of Git mirrors off a $5 VPS served from a folder that I run python3 -m http.server in; it's literally just that and it works beautifully.

Agreed, git is great!

And what about ssl?

Ignored ;)

Does rsync.net give me the ability to stop people from force-pushing to `master`? My understanding was that it was aware of files but had no concept of Git.

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