12 mo. ago • 94%

Harness launches Gitness, an open-source GitHub competitor

techcrunch.com Harness launches Gitness, an open-source GitHub competitor | TechCrunch

Since its launch in 2017, Harness, the software delivery platform founded by AppDynamics founder and CEO Jyoti Bansal, expanded from being continuous code

Hacker News @derp.foo Harness launches Gitness, an open-source GitHub competitor

58 comments

Yeah I'm into Gitness

Gitness goddamn code to compile

174
Looks interesting, although the comments about other git repo services being bloated, complicated, and resource heavy, followed by a paragraph about AI features that have been added, with more planned in the future, seems a touch ironic to me.

95
- My first thought is that it's just an AI training move
  
  22
- Isn't the whole point of these things the "bloated" (CI/CD, issue tracker, merge requests, mirroring, etc) part? Otherwise we'd all be using bare git repos over ssh (which works great btw!)
  
  It's like complaining about IDE bloat while not using a text editor. Or complaining there's too many knives in a knife set instead of buying just the chef knife.
  
  7
  
  Actually, I do use git bare repos for CD too. :) The ROOT/hooks/post-update executable can be anything, which allows to go wild : on my laptop, a push to a bare repos triggers deploy to all the machines needing it (on local or remote networks), by pushing through ssh to other bare repos hosted there, which builds and installs locally, given they all have their own post-update scripts ; all of that thanks to a git push and scripts at the proper paths. I don't think any forge could do it more conveniently.
  
  For me the main interest of forges is to publish my code and get it discovered (before GitHub, getting people to find your repos hosted on your blog's server was a nightmare). Even for the collaboration, I could do with emails. That being said, most people aren't on top of their inbox, in which mails from family are mixed with work mails and commercial spam in one giant pile of unread items, so it's a good thing for them we have those issue trackers.
  
  3
Im amused that the repo for it is on github and not on, well, Gitness

65
- total power move
  
  8
There hasn’t been a new Git repo launch in almost a decade

Am I the only person annoyed they seem to mistake repositories for forges? It's already annoying when casual users say "git" for "GitHub", but those guys actually want to build a forge, explaining they're going to do better than anyone else. Maybe start by properly using the terms?

64
- And of course there have been forges launched, including SourceHut, Gitea, Gogs, Forgejo…
  
  24
  
  Gitea, Gogs, Forgejo
  
  "They are the same picture."
  
  8
- Here I am knowing the difference between git and GitHub, GitLab, ...
  
  But what's a 'forge' please ?
  
  23
  
  That's the name we use to designate software like GitHub, GitLab and similar, which provide repositories hosting and tooling like issue trackers. It's supposed to be named like that because of SourceForge, the oldest of such tools, although I didn't hear the term "forge" before the last 5 years or so, long after SourceForge demise, so I imagine there is a bit of nostalgia in this name (not sure who is nostalgic of SourceForge, though 😂). The wikipedia page : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forge_(software)
  
  22
  
  @Valmond @Anafroj gitlab, GitHub, sourceforge are forges. They use a tool to manage source code : git.
  
  4
- I myself have launched several new git repos in the last decade. Where's my article TechCrunch?
  
  22
- I complained when the term "crypto" was co-opted. Come die with me on this hill where we care about things.
  
  19
- Also plain wrong - Codeberg launched in 2019. Now the question is: did the author just not know better, or is he paid not to know?
  
  10
  
  Codeberg isn't an entirely new forge. It's just a well-known gitea/forgejo instance. Sourcehut would probably be a better example.
  
  12
  
  The worst part is that this is a direct quote from Harness' CEO, not from TechCrunch author. :) Maybe they have a great product, I don't know, but it certainly feels like an amateurish launch. :D
  
  5
- I thought you were being overly pedantic but my god, they keep repeating the point. They seem to have no idea what the difference between a platform hosting code repositories and an individual repository is or even what version control software is. What the bloody hell is this.
  
  7
  
  At the very least, it means the CEO doesn't understand the domain. It may be because he sees this part of the business as secondary and less important, or because it was developed so fast he didn't have time to grasp the concepts, probably he was not a driving force in that effort. I certainly hope the tech side is more aware. Without more proof of CEO implication, I certainly would not bet on that horse to survive in the distant future, though.
  
  2
Nobody name their new product Gitler for some reason. Such a good name.

53
- The logo writes itself.
  
  18
Gitea and Forgejo are the way to go. Especially Forgejo which is working on federation just like Lemmy but for Forgejo repos and instances.

49
I want gitea to get federation

36
AI? Not bloated? Mmm. Will stick with Gitea.

20
Seems fast compared to self-hosted GitLab or Bitbucket. I don't see a way to add an ssh key or gpg key for code signing. No dark mode so expect to burn your retinas out in the middle of the night. I'll wait until it's a little more fleshed out before thinking about replacing Gitea in my network, though.

15
- How's it compare to gitea?
  
  1
  
  I found it much more barebones in my tinkering. It doesn’t seem to support pulling via SSH (and definitely doesn’t support signing commits). Configuration options appear extremely limited, both in documentation and the UI.
  
  It looks nice, but I don’t really see the point to it when Gitea Actions is now a thing. Gitea is a more mature product, and is similarly fast and lightweight.
  
  Edit: s/Gitea/Forgejo. Gitea has moved to a for-profit model since I made this comment.
  
  1
So Gitlab

13
- Gitlab takes way more RAM to run the docker container than i want. If this is lighter, that sounds nice. And im using only the most basic functionality, so wont be much loss to me if it cant do whatever fancy stuff.
  
  15
  
  How about Gogs? The whole thing is < 30 MB, and is lightweight enough to run on a Raspberry Pi. You can even get a native binary package if you want to run it without the overhead of Docker.
  
  15
  
  Gitea?
  
  6
  
  Fair. Competition is also good.
  
  5
- I love Gitlab as a git hosting platform. I like that it is open source. My problem is they're pricing plan forced me to move to GitHub. I don't use their DevOps stuff so paying even 19$/month per user for a lot of features I don't need sucks, and hosting it my own is a headache I don't want to deal with because we're not that big. GitHub isn't a choice I make out of preference for my private commercial projects... Jetbrains space even though it is nice isn't best for me because even though it has git hosting it has a lot of other stuff that I don't want yet again, I work with all kinds of people, non technical as well and it makes no sense yet again. I also use tools or platforms that don't integrate with git directly but with GitHub or GitLab... which fucking sucks honestly... also look at netlify... you need an ENTERPRISE plan to connect to a self-manget Gitlab repo. Like the shit these platforms are pulling IS UNBELIEVABLE. AndGiitness looks to be a commercial product, so clearly they'll also be pushing and spending money to make sure other platforms work with them and only thing that matters is the features they add and their pricing plan... I hope they become a good competitor to these big Git hosting platforms and a viable alternative.
  
  As much as Git should have been a decentralized solution that is free and open to be used by anyone because we're not using Git in a vacuum but with a lot of other external tools and platforms, because of how tools and platforms are built we actually end up in a very centralized and controlled status quo. ://////// it fucking sucks.
  
  Please point out where I am wrong and come up with your own ideas and solutions. I am really curious.
  
  1
  
  Also yeah, how do you use git?
  
  1
- Gitlab is an interesting project.
  
  Admittedly looks good and has the feature set, but..
  
  You dig in at all it's a mess. If it screws up, it's a mess. Every five minutes they seem to have another extremely severe security issue. Even when it's working right, it's a resource hog.
  
  Has the feel of a lot of mismatched stuff duct taped together, but the duct tape looks great. So as a user, great. As an admin, a bit of a mess.
  
  1
Does someone have a link to an instance to view? I don't get why their code is hosted on Github

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i'm not finding a way to prevent creating users right now... i'm just able to register new users again and again on the docker run. maybe i'm just missing the config (the documentation is looking like it needs to be fleshed out).

not really trying to anyone with the url make an account on my basement computer...

5
@loren how does it compare to #gitea ?

2

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