CodePlex Hg Hosting

This is a follow-up to my previous post on Hg Hosting Providers. I found that on the surface all four of them were very similar. From the four providers I investigated, CodePlex overall felt most intriguing, so I decided to start by trying out that one.

Note: I participate in another project, which I will be uploading to Bitbucket (because that’s the only one that supports small private projects at no charge), so I may be doing a follow-up on that provider too.

Sign Up and Project Creation

The CodePlex home page lures you into creating a project with a big, purple, Metro-style button:

When you hit the button you’ll be asked to either sign in or register:

If you don’t have an account yet (like I did) you can register for one on the spot. I decided to create an account linked to my Windows Live ID:

The hardest part is the Captcha: damn those things can be a challenge! After finally completing this mini-game, it turned out CodePlex had forgotton all about my intention to “Create a Project”, and instead presented me with my personal (and very empty) project home page:

Luckily, there’s another (though less obvious) “Create a Project” link on the page. There’s only a small number of fields you have to complete:

The whole point for me was to choose Mercurial hosting, but it’s noteworthy that both TFS (which also supports SVN clients) and Git are an option too. Hit “Create” and if all goes well you’ll be directed to the brand new project’s home page:

The project has now entered the “Setup Period”. This gives you 30 days to set up the project, i.e. before you have to go live. This was in fact a welcome surprise to me, because since this was my first time coordinating a hosted project the setup period allows me to calmly check out all the features.

Importing the Existing Repository

Keeping in mind that eventually I would be hosting the code online, I had already started with a Hg repository, committing my changes locally. There are several advantages to using version control while still flying solo, amongst others having backups and traceability.

I already suspected it wouldn’t be too hard to merge an existing repository into a new hosted project, and I even got some response to my question on Twitter, indicating it should be possible. The only thing I was worried about is that the username for commits would be “wrong”, because my computer user name “Jeroen” is different from my new CodePlex user name “jeroenheijmans”. To get everything to work I took the following steps:

1. A simple copy/paste back-up of the existing repository, just to be safe.
2. With some effort I got this Hg convert trick to work, changing the user name in commits for the existing repository to my CodePlex username.
3. Make a clone (a.k.a. check out) of the project repository from CodePlex to a new local folder.
4. Copy the existing repository over the clone from CodePlex.
5. Some of the hidden files in the .hg folder have to be overwritten. I double checked all files with Notepad++, and in all (my!) cases the clone’s file could be safely overwritten.
6. Using TortoiseHg I now pushed all the changes. In the previous step the CodePlex URL was probably lost, but that was easily remedied by entering it once more.

To be honest, in hindsight I don’t know if step 4 and 5 are really necessary. I guess you could safely try just pushing your existing repo to CodePlex: if it doesn’t work surely you’ll get an explanatory error message?

Either way, after completing the above steps my CodePlex project contained a complete history of 40+ commits, only minutes after setting up the project!

CodePlex Features Overview

After importing the source code it was time to investigate the various CodePlex features. Given the 30 day setup period I was able to check out all the features without having to worry others may see my silly mistakes. Here’s my first impression of the available features:

• Home is the first thing you see if you go to the project URL (which is a nice subdomain of CodePlex: http://yourproject.codeplex.com). It mainly contains some text to explain what the project is all about, and you’re invited to edit it (with Wiki-style markup). Worked nice and easy for my simplistic purposes.
• Downloads is the section where you can offer releases, which can have various properties as well as attachments such as binaries or installers. So far I’ve only created two “Planned Releases”, which worked pretty straightforward.
• Documentation is Wiki-based. So far I’m headed straight for the quintessential documentation pitfall: I’ll create it once the product’s finished.
• Discussions looks like a forum-based commenting area. Given that the project is one we do together with friends we may not get to use this option much.
• Issue Tracker is a very basic work-item system. It contains the bare essentials, but not much more. This was a bit disappointing to be honest, I would at least have liked to have some basic formatting, but apparently that’s still a work item on CodePlex itself.
• Source Code is the section where… well… you can find the source code! It shows all commits in descending order, and even though I haven’t tried it yet it also shows forks and pull requests. If you click on a commit you get to see the diffs for changed files.
• People shows all the coordinators, developers and editors on the project. It’s also the place to invite your team mates to the party!
• License is where you can view and change the license for your project. CodePlex allows you to choose from ten different OSI licenses. I’m leaning towards picking the BSD license, but this license stuff feels like a snake pit (with it’s own acronym: IANAL).

So far this list of features seems pretty sufficient. At least: I haven’t “missed” a feature so far.

Conclusions

All together I’m pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to set all this up. I’m not sure (yet) how it actually compares to the other hosting providers I considered, but so far I’m happy I chose CodePlex.

I’m fairly certain our project will be published some time soon, and when it does you can find it at bieb.codeplex.com: join the party!