GitFlic: The Russian analogue of GitHub has left beta. Let's see what's there

Hello everyone, dear friends. This is a new format for me, a review format. Therefore, do not judge strictly, writing this review turned out to be not as easy as I saw it at the beginning. I’ll say right away that it is not paid for by the creators of GitFlic, I’m just interested in writing about it. So, in Russia they created an analogue of the American GitHub. The project is called GitFlic , it has already left beta, which means that ordinary users can already register. But before we do that, we need to understand what kind of project it is, how many people are working there and for how long, so that we don't have unreasonable expectations. Actually, that’s what I had at the beginning.

A little history

Against the backdrop of changes in GitHub’s policy and possible sanctions, the question of whether a repository is needed for projects in Russia has arisen. And they wrote that the Russian government wants to allocate 2.1 billion rubles to create an analogue. And it might seem that this project was paid for by the government, but after browsing the Internet a little, I found an interview in which there are many answers to the questions that interest us. The following can be taken from it:

1. This project is not public, but private. And it has nothing to do with the mentioned 2.1 billion rubles. This is even good, the product will compete and try to offer something new and in demand, it will not be a place to “cut” the budget and the creators will try to offer something of their own.

2. At the time of writing the interview (10.28.21), there were only 5 people in the team, which included three backenders, one front-end developer and a manager. There were no expansion plans due to budget. But, after searching on the Internet, I found a vacancy for a Java developer for their project, and this is a good sign. So, the money did appear.

3. The project is only 10 months old, that is, it is still very young and most likely raw. Therefore, there is no point in comparing without this understanding with the same GitHub (which is already 13 years old).

4. The project is written in Java!! This cannot but please us Javas. And if you look at the job description that I showed above, you can understand what technologies GitFlic is written on:

   • Java 11;
   • PostgresQL 11.x;
   • RabbitMQ;
   • Redis;
   • Spring framework 5;
   • Spring boot 2;
   • Spring data;
   • Spring core;
   • Spring messaging;
   • Spring mvc;
   • Spring security;
   • Spring HATEOAS;
   • Spring integration.

5. The overall goal is to create a place to store code in Russia and for Russia, so that in case of blocking, people can safely store their code.

6. What will attract is educational integration with Russian universities. It will help to have your own place to store lab work and other things, which is very important. To be honest, I don’t even know where they do it now. If there are students among the readers, please share where you store your lab code?

7. There is a paid option, the project needs to earn money. But it is much cheaper than its analogues. On top of that, you can develop private projects in a team of up to 5 people without paying, which is very good. I consider this a plus.

So, I think the introduction was enough, now we have some idea of ​​what we are about to see, so we need to go and register!

First steps

First, let's go to their landing page , there we will see: Here we see that we can already register, we will do this a little later. The first Russian service for storing code and working with it... Apparently, yes, the first. I had never heard of the others before. And here I have a question: why didn’t they do this earlier? He should have appeared a long time ago. Below are the features of the project:

• You can work in a team. Without this, it is generally unclear who would need such a project.

• Merge requests. It’s not very clear yet, but I think this is something similar to how in GitHub you can offer your changes through a pull request after forking a project. Apparently, this is an example of The Forking Strategy. I described this approach here , you can read it.

• 2fa profile protection. This is already a de facto safety standard, well done for immediately thinking about this. That's definitely a plus.

• Availability of both public and private repositories. Without this, as well as without working in a team, it is impossible now.

And those that are planned to be added soon:

• Code discussion. Ability to comment on sections of code. Interesting, let's see how they implement it.

• Task tracker. Full integration with the code, which is very important and in demand. For now we will wait.

• Telegram notifications. The thing is certainly useful, but it looks somehow faded compared to others. Well, God bless him, it is what it is)

Judging by the range of functionality, we can say that the project is still just at the start of its development. There are still a lot of features that I would like. Will wait. Next, we repeat once again that the code is stored in Russia and on Russian servers. I think there will be those for whom this is important. And the company’s actual mission: “We are confident that GitFlic will become not only a platform for storing code and working with it, but a full-fledged community of developers and just people who love programming, both as a hobby and as their main income.” The idea is quite interesting. And this is where the landing page ends.

Price policy

So far the payment is simple. 250 rubles per person in a team of more than 5 people. This is, roughly speaking, 3.5 dollars. The price is small, but so far they have nothing special to offer. Only in the future, so there is no point in comparing the price with other places to store repositories. In the future, they promise CI/CD, static code analysis, and a task tracker. And also launch applications in the cloud. The latter seems very interesting, but for now these are just words, let's see what happens.

Registration

It's time to register and see what's inside...) Registration, as usual, is everywhere, the design leaves much to be desired, but as the technical director said: “The design will also get around to it and it will be better.” Okay, let's believe it)) I created a test project to see what it looks like. Everything is reminiscent of GitHub: the buttons are in the same places, the functionality is all similar, subscriptions to other developers are available and the opportunity to rate the project (here it’s called the “Favorites” section ). Here is a link to my account, if you wish, subscribe. I don’t know if I will use this project, we’ll see. The fact that it is functionally similar to GitHub is a good thing. Those who have used GitHub will find it easier to switch to GitFlic. Besides, there is no point in reinventing the wheel a second time. From what differs from GitHub: when creating a project, the programming language in which the project will be initially selected is selected. A controversial decision, in my opinion. On GitHub this is determined by the amount of code. Maybe this is a temporary solution that was made while there is no functionality by definition in the repositories. The newly created project comes with a cheat sheet for working with git. Helpful, thanks. One interesting thing: if you try to delete the repository, the button does not click. Perhaps this will be fixed when you read the article, but now, as I write, it does not work. And so the functionality repeats what was done in GitHub. But at this stage of the project's development, I don't see anything wrong with it. This approach works successfully and has shown that it has a place to be.

Should I move my projects or not?

Good question, because if you already use GitFlic, you need to understand why. I think those who are afraid of GitHub going down should create copies of their projects here. To whom this does not concern, I see no point in transferring it.

conclusions

I think this is a great initiative. There is a need for the project and people have appeared who decided to create it. What’s important is that this is not a government project, which means that there will be competition with the provision of features that will attract people. There is also a target audience, which means that the project will live. Yes, the project is still raw. And you won’t be able to use it fully and only with it for now (at least development cannot take place without CI/CD in our time). I think you can take a closer look at GitFlic, create some projects to better learn how to use it and wait for updates. Friends, as always, I invite you to subscribe to my telegram channel . There I write about development, about my new articles, in the channel chat we often discuss interesting topics, the channel is the author’s, so it’s always nice and cozy there) In this article I tried to show you a new project - a place to store code. I'm waiting for your feedback, I'm very interested in what you think about this. All the best!