Hosting Code

GitHub

At the time of this writing, GitHub is the most popular way to host public code. GitHub hosts git repositories and provides additional free (but not Open Source) functionality such as pull requests, issue trackers, and wikis. If you haven't already, you can read the How to Git chapter to learn more about how git works.

There is more to GitHub than a visualization of a git repo. Let's go through a "hypothetical" situation where you find a typo in this book and you, a developer, want to fix it. Firstly, you'll want to fork the repo. Find the button to fork the repo and GitHub will create a repository like github.com/your-username/HowToFOSS.

Note: You might notice a couple other buttons nearby, Watch and Star. Watching a repo will notify you when issues are created and commented on among other things. Starring a repo is way of showing your approval and support of a project, as well as acting as a bookmark for later.

Back to our scenario. You now have a clone of this book that you can do nearly anything with. For now, you want more than anything to go and fix the chapter containing the egregious spelling error. You can do this either by cloning the repo or by editing the file directly on GitHub. By viewing the file directly and clicking on the Edit button (ed. note: It is a pencil icon on the current site), you will be brought to an editor that will allow you to make changes, write a commit message, and create a commit in one fell swoop.

The world is very nearly a better place with that spelling error fixed. But how do you get your changes into the book that you are reading right now? You submit a Pull Request.

A pull request, or PR, will let the upstream developer know that you have made changes that you would like to be included their repository. Clicking the green button shown above will initiate a PR using all the commits exclusive to your repo. If another commit is added to your repo after you've opened the PR, it will be automatically included. After the upstream developer decides your code is OK to merge, the PR will be closed and your code will be merged. GitHub has a more in-depth tutorial of how pull requests work if you would like more information.

Woo! The fix for the spelling error is now included in the book! But what do you do with your forked repo? It is a matter of personal preference. In general, if you do not plan on contributing in the future and you feel that having a duplicated codebase might confuse people, delete the fork. Your contributions will live on in the upstream repository and you will not lose credit for your work.

Bitbucket

Bitbucket is built on Mercurial, a DVCS similar to git. Bitbucket is similar to GitHub, and now supports both git and Mercurial. Like GitHub, it provides extra free, but not Open Source, features.

CodePlex

CodePlex is a Microsoft-backed code host primarily used for C# .NET projects. With the recent transition of .NET to Github it would seem that Microsoft is beginning to move off of the platform.

SourceForge

Any discussion of project hosts has to talk about SourceForge as its significance a decade ago rivaled that of GitHub now. While the vast majority of new projects are not started on SourceForge anymore, it still boasts some 30 million downloads of hosted software each week. Code on SourceForge is backed by SVN, a version control system that has been losing conceptual ground to git and other systems for some time.