Let us talk about SCM cloud services … if GitHub is good for you, fine. Otherwise Bitbucket may be your way out.

Why not Github?

I suppose that most if not all of you have heard about Github. It is one of the largest source code management services on the internet, well I’d consider them to be the market leader. It is mainly preferred by open-source projects for a reason, I believe. The same reason ticks me off: it is only free when your repositories are public!

Myself, I don’t like to be forced to go public or pay for privacy.

Comment: Github has recently been acquired by Microsoft. MS claims to keep them separate, nevertheless terms might change. With MS behind it, things might get better, regarding non-public repositories. Check it out before taking decisions!

So, what else?

Luckily there is an alternative: Atlassian has a service called Bitbucket. With Bitbucket, even for the free plan, your repositories may be private. Cool. There is also a wiki based on Markdown and … git. Using git and having the wiki based on git as well, you can backup your stuff with a simple script … to anywhere.

Bitbucket, explained

Bitbucket offers you a free account. In the account you can define teams (up to five people in the free plan).

Your work is defined in projects that may have one or more git repositories. Every repository may have an optional wiki for documentation. Practically the wiki is just a separate git-repository for interlinked [[markdown]]-files. This makes it easy to edit it offline or just back it up.

Large file storage

Some projects have large files like grafics, sound, archives or alike. The free plan support up to 1GB of these. That should be enough. If not: Box.com or Dropbox might help you out. Please note: I did not manage to have the large files downloaded without Bitbucket’s web interface. So a mere wget or curl call did not get me anywhere, but I did not check this out in all depth and detail.

Bitbucket … in-house

For the paranoid amoungst us: Bitbucket exists also as installable software for your own server (like on a Vserver or at home). 10€ or so are really just a nominal fee for that. But then you have to go through the hassle of installing and maintaining it.