Github, a go-to site among software developers for shared code and related information, is having a bad couple of days.
The site experienced a major outage early Tuesday. At 8:35 a.m. PST, it posted that it took down a bad database and was working to restore the affected database cluster. Over the course of the morning the company’s status site alternated between “major service outage” and “partial service outage” messages.
The problems may be rippling from outages on Monday when the site was down for just short of 20 minutes, according to The Next Web.
Github going down is no small thing. Developers from newbies to superstars like Ray Ozzie (former chief software architect for Microsoft(s msft) ) love the site, which acts as a central repository for much of the open-source code that runs our world.
As one Twitter poster commented, if Github isn’t working, real work doesn’t get done.
A spokesman for the San Francisco-based company said it will publish a post mortem to its blog later today.
If you guys were to look for an alterantive to github — what are the options besides Google code???
Bitbucket for one. And it might actually be a good idea to mirror the central repo with multiple providers when it comes to VCS hosting. It’s already becoming a best practice to do that with cloud hosting in general.
Also, as someone mentioned already, the distributed model means every developer has a copy of the entire codebase, so work does not have to come to a standstill just because the central repo is down. Any developer can also push to or pull from another developer, so collaboration goes on with/without the central repo.
By the way, it’s actually relatively easy to setup a Git central server on the typical *nix server — even if just as a temporary solution when a central server goes down.
thanks JohnB– Atlassian has also been mentioned.
Github is down != Git is down. Unlike with a centralised service like SVN or CVS, you can still make commits and keep working. What isn’t available is being able to push to the central server (you can still push to other developers) but perhaps more importantly, access the tools Github provides…for us at Server Density that is Github issues. It was quite funny to see .patch files being shared in our company chat room though – not seen them for a long time!
you could? When i went up this morning there was no access, zero. although i’m not sure how long that was the case.
I believe he’s saying that you can’t pull or push, but you can still make commits and branch to your local repository, then push when it comes back online. That’s the whole key behind a DVCS. And even if you need to share files, as he said, you can create .patch files and send them through other means
Yeh, what Cory said. Also, you can set up different remote locations to push to so you could push to another developer over a local network. Github acts like a central repo but it’s really just another remote location and could be anyone (or your own Git server if you wanted to run one).
You gotta be kidding me for sure !