Introducing the Redesigned Bitbucket
blog.bitbucket.org
blog.bitbucket.org
I think there is still a chance for BitBucket to make a splash, but I think its going to be hard to win anymore. That's fine, 2nd place makes a lot of money too (not counting places 1-10 for enterprise source control, which basically print money, and of which GitHub is chasing too).
1. Find the little "Source" link and click it.
2. Find the "Browse" link, which is in a little toolbar right under the other little toolbar, next to the (less relevant) "Changes" and "Clones" links, which look visually near-identical.
3. In most (but not all) projects, hunt down the word "trunk" in tiny 13px text, and click it to see the main development branch.
Compare to GitHub or BitBucket, which just show you the damn code.
(Yes, I know you were joking, but I've been wanting to rant about this UI failure for a while now. And don't even get me started on Launchpad.)
After five years or whatever of being tricked into clicking Launchpad links, I just noticed the other day that they have a "source" link on the top left corner. I had no idea they actually displayed source code. I always thought it was some crappy bug reporting product. Who knew?
Hah. Got you, it's also a crappy project-hosting product, a crappy code-hosting product, a crappy code review product and a crappy FQA/Q&A product. And an acceptable translation product (not as good as Transifex, but it's free, bit it requires using the rest of that crap).
That's a pretty low bar to set though.
> and it handles bugs that affect multiple projects really well
Kind-of, changing the project set (outside of adding projects to an existing bug) might be impossible (same with in-project "series" — its code for branches), until fairly recently the role of some statuses was very unclear (and I'm still not entirely sure of their actual use), one of the links is essentially useless and — as everywhere else in launchpad — text formatting is completely non-existent (without even talking about richer data sets, such as adding screenshots to bug reports which falls under "add attachment or patch").
Multi-project and multi-branch tracking are nice, but they're limited and they don't make the tracker much friendlier.
GitX is pretty good (I think I still prefer the original one over the Laullon gitx, but the Laullon gitx has an acceptable annotate view and look nice), and surprisingly the best annotate view I've seen so far is in bazaar's qt-based UI. The tools are not necessarily great overall (and the OSX interactions are downright weird), but the annotate is excellent.
That may be some of the reason that I like it. I am able to do a lot of the things that I could do from the command line, but with a visual interface to help me visualize what's going on.
For example, when I'm doing a commit, I can click on each file that's been modified and see the diff for that file right on the side. I can then stage all or just parts of the changes. So if I have some debug lines, I can stage the file and then unstage the debug logging so it doesn't get committed.
There's just a lot of little things like that that you CAN do with the git command line yourself, but it wraps up in a way that's easier to consume.
I'd have to take more time than I have now to write up a full review of what I like about it compared to other GUIs.
Let's be honest about git: A user unfamiliar with the CLI commands will have a difficult time, period. I hesitate to predict that it's impossible to create a good UX, but git is a very complicated system with an abstraction that leaks all the way down to database records. Breathe on it wrong and the repository will wedge into a state that sends longime veterans off to stackoverflow.
Yes, git is worth it... but so far every clever GUI has basically been a convenience tool for power users, not a better abstraction that can sidestep the learning curve. It's hard to see how this is going to change without some sort of fundamental change in git.
Even with fairly boring usage, the Github GUI periodically wedges my repository into a state which requires CLI interaction (and a trip to stackoverflow). It's even worse for newbies - I get desperate pleas for help from clients all the time. I have come to the conclusion that there is no way around teaching the command line first, then giving them the Github client after they achieve competence.
No, I have not tried to reproduce the incidents which screwed up my repository. After a few harrowing experiences I pretty much gave up using the Github for Mac client for anything except basic commits. And even that screws up - I frequently have to commit files twice; it's like the client only stages some of the files, even though they're all checked. If my commits are large I usually go to the command line to avoid the double commit msgs. I'm about to give up entirely.
It's still the best on OSX though.
Before you answer, consider http://www.extremetech.com/computing/120981-github-hacked-mi...
A couple of years ago I was at one of the Github drink meetups. I asked if they were working on encrypted private repos (this was just before or around the time Github Firewall was introduced). A Github employee told me no… before adding that in his opinion source code was not valuable.
I asked him to clarify and he said imagine if Twitter had their source code leaked. It wouldn't be a big issue as Twitters success was built more on business execution rather than code. A valid point perhaps but small indie developers could easily be put out of business if the source code to their unique selling point or competitive advantage were to be made public.
I'm sure Github (and others) take security seriously, but given the above, caveat emptor!
Same thing here. I used to pay for github for a private repo for code to a couple of apps I sell. Once I found BB, it was a no brainer to switch over.
You cost them money.
I use BB for the free private Git repos but had always planned to switch to paid Github once I actually need collaborators. Now I could see staying with BB when I need to go paid.
Yes. If Github offered just one free private repo, then I would move to them in a heartbeat.
Github is still Github, after all. ("Second resume" etc.) Unfortunately current circumstances prevent me from open-sourcing a certain small segment of my codebase, and... well... Bitbucket is free, and I'm living on Ramen while trying not to worry about my dwindling savings account. So it's a pretty clear-cut choice for me.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1384325/in-git-is-there-a...
Instead of creating a repo per project, I create a orphan branch within a shared repo for that project. The benefit of this approach is that you can always cleanly export the commits into its own repository without altering SHA ids. The con is that you have to pick separate branch names for each project (e.g. proj1-master, proj2-master).
I moved my personal private repos to BitBucket a long time ago, and haven't looked back.
Well, when you've got a large list of things stored on a computer, and you want them displayed in a certain order, automatic sorting (after you assign a priority) is a lot more useful than having to rearrange them manually.
I mean, if you want to build a natural language parser that counts how many times the words "URGENT" and "HELP" appears in the issue and then automatically reorders it, you can do that with the Github issues API anyways, right? I don't know of existing bug trackers that make priority automatic.
You can filter based on labels in github issues, if that's what you meant.
GitHub also does a Educational plan, but it requires manual requests and IIRC they give you a Micro account. So Bitbucket is the default choice for all my shared class projects.
Looks like I can host my $22 github account for free on bitbucket.
also, it's backed up by Atlassian.
BitBucket is run by Atlassian, their goal is to later upsell you to their line of products, so they loss lead with free unlimited private repos in the hope that if you need a project management/bugtracker system you might choose JIRA.
Bitbucket for opensource things Stash for our firm's repos behind the firewall.
And i have been using github for years, paid account, like others. Paid github vs Atlassian Stash ? Stash wins.
http://www.atlassian.com/software/stash/pricing
Contrast with Github where the minimum purchase is 1 seat pack (up to 20 users), costing $5000/year, and you don't get any access to the the source code.
(I am just asking since it seems to be a selling point, and I have never really modified the code of a tool that I have used. For example, how many people modify Eclipse, or Maven, or BugZilla's source code?)
Having the source is critical to develop tightly integrated plugins for customization.
It does not have all the features of github or bitbucket but is selfhosting and opensource.
EDIT: We are not a startup, but still something to consider.
Bitbucket nails the private project space; so for small dev companies they are perfect.
I've been a BB user from early on and they have successfully focused on this niche for some time now.
I'd say both are equally perfect options for their respective usage :-)
For such people, Github is ridiculously expensive, since their price is based on the number of repositories you have. For instance, at work we've got enough repositories (all small) that we'd need the $200/month Github plan. In terms of storage costs, that works out to about $10/megabyte/month.
That's 5 ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more than the market rate for cloud storage. When you are selling something 5 orders of magnitude above the market rate, there is room for competitors.
I don't contest that there are probably people who only need a remote git repo and nothing else. But those companies that would service them either compete on features or get pushed down to wholesale cloud storage prices, a place you don't want to be unless you're Amazon.
Paying for a service that can double or triple a developer's productivity - people say the UI on BB is still not as great, so that counts for something - must at some point justify that developer's time.
If you have enough repos that you'd need to spend $200 a month on a platform that offers:
- Wikis
- Basic Issue Tracking
- Source Control (and damn good source control at that)
- Integration with many popular startup tools
Trying to skimp on this is like telling your 10+ dev team to use google talk for offline coordination. Yes, you save money on chat, but you lose all that time I waste copy-pasting and coordinating chats between multiple devs.
They're well known for their wiki, Confluence, and their ticket/issue/task tracker, JIRA. Source control is a natural extension of those tools, which I'd guess have had some effort put into making sure they work well together.
Looks like Stash is what they sell to enterprises, versus BitBucket which is hosted. Anyone know if these are completely separate products, or if they share a common codebase?
I've found SourceTree to be a great GUI tool for working on Git/Mercurial repos.
All of which is to say, good on them. I'm glad to see two very respectable players in this space.
I would gladly use more products by them
Two separate codebases. Bitbucket is running on a Python stack (Django) and Stash is built on a Java stack (traditional Atlassian stack). Stash can be extended through plugins (https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/app/stash/popular?...)
People have been begging Google to pay them! https://code.google.com/p/support/issues/detail?id=1829
* Free private repo for small teams
* Unlimited private repos for pay customers (price is per user)
Github's pricing with a limit in the repo number makes it pretty much impossible to use if you're in the service business and you start a new project quite often. It may be fine for the startup with one main project, I guess.
What kind of source control do big corps use? Don't they just use SVN, with enormous budget for maintenance contracts?
(TFS obviously for Microsoft houses only.)
Please keep on doing what you are doing. Your service and this new redesign is awesome, and my team and myself wouldn't be where we are without you.
We're a small team of young developers working on a startup for the past few months. We haven't launched yet so we're obviously not profitable, but the fact that you've enabled us to make it as far as we have also ensures that when we are in a position to pay for software development tools they will come from a brand we know, trust, and love: Atlassian.
Also, you should update the Atlassian Store with t-shirts and other swag.
Once again, great job, thank you, and keep on keepin' on.
Launching a t-shirt store in three weeks.
We will make a posting on our blog about it.
Hope you get hold of the .com domain name soon.
Then again, Github and Bitbucket routinely have the same issue as far as my experiences go (I mostly use Bitbucket, but routinely interact with github due to the project on there)
Beanstalk's web interface had fewer features and, more worryingly, it just failed to display changesets quite often (was also down for maintenance relatively frequently).
I use BitBucket for a number of side-projects mostly as a way to make sure all my code is backed up off-site, for free.
I like BitBucket better then Github.
I read the new BitBucket blog post and *then* I signed up
http://www.elearnenglishlanguage.com/difficulties/thanthen.h...
Has anyone ever tried to implement a 'crowd-correct' feature where a reader could do something like correct "then->than", and if enough users made the same correction (a couple high-rep users, or more low-rep users) it would stick.
I supposed the biggest challenge would be user abuse -- changing even just one word can completely change the meaning of a comment, and yet the comment would still be attributed to the OP. You would need, at least, a flag to indicate the post had been 'crowd-corrected', and perhaps a way for the OP to revert & lock their comment.
Another thought is use Google's auto-complete API, if you pass it the string "better then Github" it returns "better than Guthub". I find simply running a Google search on a phrase is often the best way to auto-correct it.
You have to be very careful, though, because there may be legal (and definitely social) ramifications for changing a user's submitted content without consent. I know it absolutely enrages me when Flickr auto-lowercases an all caps comment I try to post. ("lazer cat!@!" doesn't have quite the same oomph as "LAZER CAT!@!")
The solution knocking around my head for this
was a "sub-channel" for off-topic corrections
to posts
b) looking like a <nasty word> for calling them out.
How one is supposed to find what have bitbucketer done? Visit e.g. Ian Bicking's account: https://bitbucket.org/ianb . Is it easy to find out why are so many people following Ian? What repositories are interesting? "bbdocs" with 4 followers? From the first page of Ian's repositories I know "dozer", did Ian wrote it? Click. Oh, it's an outdated fork.
Just compare the direction Github took at its recent redesign. GitHub folks made user profiles act like resume. The repositories are visually big, it is clear what repositories are popular, what repos are active, etc. It is also clear what a person is into: repositories are sorted by 'last modified' date. There is "Explore" section with trending repos (bitbucket's Explore is a joke) and so on.
Bitbucket instead removed follower counts and fork counts from the repositories list; repositories are sorted alphabetically now; there is no way to see who the user follows or who user is followed by.
I was missing important ticket updates at bitbucket several times because the newsfeed is not "infinite"; "Inbox" messages count stops working sometimes, etc.
There are things bitbucket is better at: e.g. github links to source code lines are awful (they don't contain changeset information in URL by default and so easily become outdated); there is no way to specify repo language in github (one of my recent Python repos was in a "Top followed this week" for a C language, that's great of course but..)
Don't get me wrong, bitbucket becomes nicer and nicer, I'm still a heavy bitbucket user and we use a paid account at work; but it seems that the open source support (code discovery and presentation) is not their priority right now, or at least they act so.
It's looking pretty damn good to me right now!
1) not all users are coders. For instance Sourceforge assumes that people will be most interested in downloading a binary. Not a bad assumption for its time, and still its primary usage. Github often the top google link for a project, and would be intimidating for somebody who just wants to download and use a Windows app.
2) If I'm interested in something, I take a look at the README, code, issues & wiki. So code as one of many rather than front and center is not necessarily correct. But once I've started using something, I've already got the code and am much more interested in everything else.
But BitBucket will continue to get better, and Atlassian doesn't produce shit products.
Maybe it has wonderful features for the developer side but I haven't used that part of it so I cannot comment.
Whenever I go to report a bug on a project and find out they have JIRA I shudder.
I sometimes wonder if github's not headed to become the new reddit. At least if you look at some of the comment threads on the site it looks that way [1].
Bitbucket feels more like an old school "code hosting" service. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
You mean the new old reddit, I presume? Where reddit was a tech-dominant site rather than a news aggregator / spam site?
I prefer Mercurial. Among other things, it has better cross platform support. Bitbucket added Git a while ago. I wish Github would add Mercurial.
Bitbucket also offers unlimited private repos. That means I only use Github for OSS projects. I use Bitbucket for everthing else. Consequently, I always recommend them to friends and companies looking for hosted repos.
edit: the "installing" section of http://hg-git.github.com/ confirms it.
My workaround is to also keep a local git mirror (git clone --mirror) and push through it:
~/repo$ hg push ~/repo.git
~/repo$ cd ~/repo.git
~/repo.git$ git push upstream
http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/blog/1267/entry-3659-visua...
I love their website and how you can create free private repos. Good business practice: Unlimited private projects, limited contributers on private projects. Win-win
Github is just greedy.
No, Github is a business.
BitBucket is offering free private accounts as a loss leader, not out of the kindness of their hearts. This is their strategy for competing with GitHub.
A $7/month subscription for private github repos is well worth it.
I can't think of any piece of software I use regularly that doesn't cross the "worth at least $7 bucks" boundary.
That's what I am getting at. $7 a month is not all that expensive, you're right - but I am only getting 5 private repositories for that $7 a month.
It just doesn't make sense to use github for private work when you have a lot of repositories.
In fact, you are putting more burden on yourself for little value. It takes 15 minutes to walk the client through how to pay for and manage a github organization. I do it with all of my clients. It is an opportunity to teach/coach and give them a sense of ownership which is how it should be.
Our only limit is then the amount of people we hire, which is far more reasonable in my eyes.
If we were working on a small number of projects, then it would absolutely not be a problem to work with Github - it's when you have a lot of tiny projects that it becomes prohibitively expensive to work with.
Fair enough, that's how Github wants to price their service - I guess its catered more to actual startups (who have a few large core projects) rather than businesses like ours.
I think Github's plans are comparable to Bitbucket - it's just the starting tier is a bit more pricey - and, honestly, $7 or $12/mo doesn't make that much difference.
Sure these projects are not too big, and the team isn't too big either, but if hosted with Github, we'd be looking at soaring costs per month, or join repos together.
And no offense but Bitbucket is still a clunky mess that lacks the most critical feature: integration with almost every open source project.
If you work for customers (say as a freelance developer) and need to create a repo each time you win a new project, the $7 plan is useless.
For me github (and git) is like iPhone, a place for the "cool kids", and bitbucket for the rest of us :) Mostly because some github/git/iPhone/Mac enthusiasts are rather loud and fanboy-like - this destroys git experience for me. I prefer calm mercurial/linux enviroment :)
What? You mean Github (which hosts the Linux kernel repository) and runs git (written by Linus Torvalds) is not linux-like?
>> No, Github is a business.
Both comments are a bit silly. Atlassian (BitBucket's creator) is one of the more successful revenue "startups" while GitHub has hardly acted like a business to date.
I'm actually considering moving to bitbucket - I have a lot of small private repos, and free vs $22/month makes a lot of sense. It's not that $22 is a "lot" of money - when you just have a bunch of small stuff on the side and don't make a ton of money off it, $22 here and $10 there starts to add up.
But I don't think Github is greedy - I'm just not their target market, and that's fine.
I don't want to have to organize my private git repositories around GitHub's idiotic account restrictions, so I'm going to give BitBucket a try with some personal repos and see if the UI works for me. If it does, you've got a new customer. :D
I've extensively used Bitbucket in the past, especially for personal projects. I love what I see here, and will continue to use the service as such. Long live Bitbucket! :)
Another place where GitHub is really dropping the ball is in the social aspect of their service with terrible activity feeds I can’t believe anyone actually uses. I wrote a rant about it here: http://pygm.us/uGhNdcGU.
There are many, many ways Bitbucket can beat—and beats—GitHub, so this new design makes me a lot more optimistic about the continuing competition between the two and the improvements this will result in on both sides.
I will say that I’m not sure whether I like a grey as dark as the one you use in your new design, though. :)
Perhaps you should up the brightness on your monitor?
http://mixergy.com/tom-preston-werner-github-interview/
(search for 'which metrics') to skip to the pricing part).
Money quote: "That’s like buying a car based on how much it weighs. It’s irrelevant."
I may be biased since GitHub does a lot to foster the developer community in my area (I nabbed a sweet contracting gig at one of their drinkups), but I'm perfectly happy with their pricing.
Car manufacturers are constantly going on about how the latest model weighs X% less than last years. Lower weight usually means better handling and a more fun driving experience...
1) People on github paid plans might switch. Thus github will make less and bitbucket more.
2) People who don't use github due to cost might sign up for paid bitbucket plans.
So much more info, and even a graph like in gitx.
Also, I recall having the ability to diff. files before the new upgrade as well, although not side-by-side as they mention in the linked article.
How is everyone else's up-time experiences in the past few months? I'm setting up a few personal projects and would like to give them another shot if they've improved that one aspect.
I'm not affiliated with either company.
We improved the architecture a few months ago and that should also contribute to the stability of the system as a whole, see more at: http://blog.bitbucket.org/2012/08/24/segregating-services/
And you can follow the status of the service at: http://status.bitbucket.org
We would love to hear more feedbacks like this through our usual support channels when it happens so we can investigate and improve our service. (Disclosure: I work on Atlassian's OnDemand team).
If Bitbucket wants to stay competitive, I think this is the least they can do -- unfortunately I don't see any innovation that puts them ahead of the other players in the market.
For instance, users are clamoring to be able to link external issue trackers of their choice (which can be done simply by URL). I think the first host to supply that feature will have a step up.
I think you misplaced the word "some". Inline pull-request comments are ripped off gh, but I've never seen arbitrary commit diffs there, it certainly isn't in the UI. The branch selector yes, the overview not at all. The UI organization has also, if anything, moved further away from Github's.
[1] https://github.com/blog/612-introducing-github-compare-view
I have it up and running now on my nginx (it was already serving all my projects), it took about 30m to do everything on Ubuntu following their how to and looking up their issues queue for a couple quirks I found.
Though I'd prefer the preview to be live...
The readme taking center stage in the "overview" page is nice. Though getting it again in the "source" page is weird
I don't blame this on Bitbucket, I blame the state of Windows Git applications.
My friend who is an artist (pretty technical too but he's not a programmer and never deals with SSH) is going to do some art for me for a game project I have in Bitbucket. I added him to my repo and told him to download Gitextensions, which seems to be, arguably, the best free graphical git app for Windows.
So, he downloaded it and set it up but when he started it up for the first time there was no option to clone from a source URL other than from Github.
First you have to figure out that you need to setup your SSH key and then clone the SSH url. I know that, but a non-programmer with no experience using git before would probably have zero clue.
You have to then setup your SSH key using Putty, and I'm sure we all know how awesome it is that SSH keys generated with Putty are in a different format than SSH keys generated with ssh-keygen, so pasting your public key into the Bitbucket site leads to nothing but problems. You have to erase some stuff, add "ssh-rsa" to the front, remove the newlines, etc. You can't just copy and paste the whole thing. If you aren't experienced with SSH keys you will not be able to figure it out. The bitbucket docs for this step assume you have an SSH key generated from ssh-keygen and not from putty, so they are of no help.
Once you get your ssh key straightened out then it's not too bad.
In short, it sucks. If Bitbucket wants to capture people other than programmers they need a better Windows app. For this reason alone I would be tempted to use Github instead since they have a dedicated Windows app.
Gitextensions is open source too so they it doesn't seem like it would be that difficult to just add support for Bitbucket just like they have for Github.
I've used SmartGit for Windows too but I'm not a fan of their products and I was looking for something free.
Does anyone have suggestions for getting non-programmers setup on Windows?
If you look at Github's home page, the top half of the page is full of links to organisation pages and popular repositories (jQuery, rails, etc.) and there's a prominent "Explore GitHub" link with trending repos, etc.
BitBucket's home page looks like it's demoing a program they want to sell: loads of examples of how it looks and who uses it, but no links to an actual, well used repository. I had to Google for an example repository to examine since I much prefer to actually play with it rather than be told how it works.
http://www.atlassian.com/software/views/bitbucket-academic-l...
Many of us, use github profile pages as resumes. Your redesign focus has been towards "repository landing pages" rather than user "user landing pages".
E.g. take a look at https://bitbucket.org/basho vs https://github.com/basho and https://bitbucket.org/basho/riak-0.9.2 vs https://github.com/basho/riak .
Please make the user pages a little richer and I shall be infinitely grateful. While we are on that, could you use a better Markdown parser please ?
I also see there is no whitespace around my h3s and not much around h1s, and h2s. Looks quite cramped. Still nicer on the whole. I guess I can try to hack in some line breaks manually.
I'm a happy paying customer with 10 users and dozens of repositories. We're an agency, work on a lot of different projects, and having price be O(people) instead of O(projects) makes lot more sense for us.
As amazing as it may sound on HN, GitHub isn't best for everyone. Therefore, there are ways to compete with them that aren't price-based.
(https://bitbucket.org/explore) redirects to (https://bitbucket.org/repo/all)
All I see on the main page are screenshots and signup links. Why should I sign up if I can't even test drive the site by browsing existing projects?
Would be nice to have an "Explore" feature similar to GitHub.
every time I try to think of a more "friendly" git, it's Bzr that pops into my mind, not Hg, but... where does one "put it on the map" in the DVCS and related services world?
Bitbucket is absolutely brilliant.
It's a really clean interface and the free private repos suit me perfectly.
Thanks for your work - a new customer here.
Only thing I'd add is the last commit details on folder names.
The pricing is such a lifesaver for small companies or hobby programmers that want some private repos.
At the datacenter, VPN access limited to a very small number of engineers on our team, and we store the repositories in a hashed directory structure that makes it difficult to identify repositories by username."
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/bitbucke...
For 5 bucks, unlimited private repos, with no collobration
What is changing in 6 months?
Oh, I forgot - I had started that in Mercurial, (/beginner/experiment/learning), though switched to Git later, and that was another huge reason.
I still have open repos on GitHub. I will either keep them mirrored at Bitbucket or might move altogether. Brining balance to the force is good :-)