The long awaited Git Hosting is finally here! However, it’s only enabled for paid account holders.

Subversion hosting here at XP-Dev.com, follows a simple model – as a free user, you don’t get a secure link to your repository. As a paid account user, you get a secure link to your repository, and additional goodies like real-time backups and nightly off-site backups.

Git hosting is traditionally done over SSH, and as that’s a secure link, it is only enable for paid account holders. I will try to get some work done to support non-secure HTTP for Git repositories in the future, but right now, I’ll be focusing on getting Mercurial hosting out of the door.

The good news is that Git hosting here in XP-Dev.com is as feature rich as the Subversion hosting offering, which means that your Git repositories will integrate nicely with Basecamp, Fogbugz, Lighthouse, Fixx and even Twitter. On top of it, your Git repositories will play nicely with your XP-Dev.com hosted Trac projects and supports intelligent commit messages that can control your Trac or even XP-Dev.com tickets/bugs/stories/tasks. Heck, even direct file hosting works uber nicely from your Git repository. If that’s not enough, we’ve enabled real-time backups and nightly off-site backups on your Git repositories as well. (All of these features are available as Subversion repositories as well)

The only thing I feel is somewhat rudimentary is the online Git repository explorer. You should be able to browse your repository online, perform diffs and do some basic actions, but it has a few draw-backs for e.g. only browses the master branch of your repository and can only diff between two trees (useful when you’ve merged many trees). Naturally, all of these will be improved in due course.

S3 backups for Git repositories are not enabled yet, only Subversion repositories.

Summary of features released on 6th March 2010:

1. Getting Started with Git Hosting on XP-Dev.com
2. svn2 moves to bigger hardware
3. Force SSL only connections for Subversion access
4. Trac Upgrades

Getting Started with Git Hosting on XP-Dev.com

The first thing to do is to head over to your account’s Settings page to setup your SSH public key: http://www.xp-dev.com/settings

There’s a text box under the heading Your Public Key where you can enter your public key. Put the whole thing in there and click on Save. Your public key needs to start with either ssh-dsa or ssh-rsa. Only DSA and RSA public keys are supported at the moment:

Once you’ve done that, head over to your Source Control tab of your project. You should see a new option called Git under type of repository:

Click on Save and the repository should be created.

The URL that you use to clone/push from/to is listed as well:

In this case you would issue commands like below to interact with your repository (using the example from the picture above):

• Clone: git clone ssh://git2.xp-dev.com/my-first-git-repo
• Push to the master branch: git push ssh://git2.xp-dev.com/my-first-git-repo master
• Add it as a remote repository: git remote add xpdev ssh://git2.xp-dev.com/my-first-git-repo
• Add it as the origin repository: git remote add origin ssh://git2.xp-dev.com/my-first-git-repo

If you have any problems with accessing your Git repository, just raise a support ticket.

I’ll be updating the documentation soon with more elaborate instructions/examples with Git hosting on XP-Dev.com

svn2 moves to bigger hardware

Part of the release done on 6th of March 2010 was to move svn2.xp-dev.com to bigger hardware. At this point all hardware that powers XP-Dev.com conforms to the following minimum specifications:

• Quad core/threads
• 8GB RAM
• 2x1.5TB hard drives in RAID1 configuration

At the moment there’s about 1.7TB of space remaining across the board, so, there’s plenty of room left!

Force SSL only connections for Subversion access

You can force only SSL access to your Subversion repositories as this will help your fellow collaborators avoid using a non-secure connection.

To enable it, head to your Source Control tab and click on Edit Repository. Ensure that the box next to Force only secure SSL connections is turned on and click Save.

Naturally, this feature is only enabled for repositories created by paid account holders.

Trac Upgrades

You should be able to enable e-mail notifications for your Trac projects . You can even force the Assigned To: fields in Trac to display a drop-down list of users (rather than a free-form text field).

Both features can be enabled/disabled under the Trac tab of your project page in XP-Dev.com.

If you have any problems with any of these feature releases, do just raise a support ticket or drop a note in the support forums