Back in 2014 or so it was announced that google code was going to be shut down. Github was founded in 2008 so it was fairly new. Bitbucket was founded in the same year. The only other choice was sourceforge. I think by then sourceforge was starting to wind down development because project developers were fanning out to different services. And the original developers that work on google code went on to bigger better things.
Here is the break down of google code's life:
- March 12, 2015 - New project creation disabled.
- August 24, 2015 - The site goes read-only. You can still checkout/view project source, issues, and wikis.
- January 25, 2016 - The project hosting service is closed. You will be able to download a tarball of project source, issues, and wikis. These tarballs will be available throughout the rest of 2016.
I personally really enjoyed google code and the simplicity of google code. It was clean, simple, fast, and best of all supported not 1, not 2 but 3 SCM systems (git, mercurial, subversion). During a time when people weren't sure what SCM they were going to use - having the options I think really drew people to it. Mercurial and git hit the scene at the same time and I don't feel like there was a SCM war over which to use - I think both had seperate philosophies of what they wanted to do. I would describe mercirual as a simpler git.
After the annoucnement I wanted to try to self host my own. I had found one product that was git specific - and it looked nice but every time I updated it - it broke (not gitea or gogs). Not what I really wanted to spend my time on. But then I found Indefero. I think that I had actually saw it years ago but at the time I felt it was too complicated to use. And it really is. Setting up Indefero is not for the faint of heart. It's not like any other webapp, like wordpress, where you upload the app, run the installer and you are done. You can use it on shared hosting but you really do need to have root-level access to the system to really use indefero.
The year was about 2013 and I wanted to migrate off of google code as it was going to be closing onto my own. So I dug into indefero. By this time though indefero had already started to spin down their service and stopped working on the project. It was sad because it was a project that had great potential and they didn't seem to want to hand the reins over to anyone - just shut it down and have it go into the history books.
I had picked up the source and went to install and set it up on my own VM. The install is kind of cumbersome and would benefit from a distro package but I digress. I had it installed and running. Only problem - the queries were not optmized and pulling up pages took a long time. Around 2014 is when I fixed things up and publicly launched to allow open registrations.
The registrations I did have went without any issues - some people were asking to add features but as a 1 woman team - it just was not feasable to add new features and upkeep in my spare time. I did the best I could. There are still a bunch of features and fixes that need to happen but won't.
I did add support for 2 factor auth. At the time I was the only SCM hosting service to have done that - so that was a nice notch for me. I was told that TOTP was only for "home use" - but now it is used by multi-million dollar companies such as paypal.
So, I ran using a modified indefero engine for 7 years. It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot. But, it feels like a lifetime because I went from using subversion, mercurial, and now I primarily use git. Now as you can see I have switched to gitea because it simplifies the support and all I will ever use is git. Here is to another 7 years of running srchub!
The question is would I ever relaunch a hosting service based on indefero? I doubt it. If there is great interest or a company wants to sponsor it then maybe. I imagine there are still a lot of companies that use one of the SCMs it supports or a mix - and indefero would be an excellent way to standardize and easily manage them. Honestly, I would probably just develop it from scratch. The code is too old and developed for an older version of PHP. But a lot of the code could easily be reused.