Your developers work tirelessly to generate code to help make your business a success. And given that most software engineers don’t work alone, they probably use a third-party service for versioning and collaboration.
But why depend on a third party to host those code repositories when you can host them on-site? You might be surprised how many tools are available to do just that, and how your business and developers can benefit from making the shift from third-party to in-house repository hosting.
What is a code repository?
If you’re considering an on-site code repository, you probably already understand what a repository is. If not, let’s find out what they are.
You can’t really define a code repository phone number list without first understanding versioning. Why? Because one of the primary benefits of using a code repository is that they generally include some form of version control system. What is this? Simply put, version control is a system that keeps track of changes to code. With version control in place, states are saved such that you can always revert back to a previous iteration.
In other words, if a team member updates the code within the repository in such a way that breaks a certain functionality, you can revert the code back to a previous version (where the code isn’t broken). That’s versioning.
Without versioning, a code repository is just a shared folder that houses code. And you could certainly do that, host a shared directory on a server for your engineers to dump their code into. But that’s not going to be too helpful.
So a code repository is a shared directory on a network that includes a version control system, as well as features like code check out/in, commit changes, and merge code. Of course, some repository systems include more features than others, but they should at least contain that baseline feature set. Essentially, you need a repository that can:
- Keep your code safe from prying eyes.
- Offer version control.
- Enable team members to easily collaborate.
- Help you prepare your code for production release.
- Retain information regarding code changes and other analytics.
A code repository doesn’t care if your language of choice is Java, JavaScript, Python, Xamarin, .NET, or Ruby. In fact, you can use a code repository for any programming language.
And now we get to the why.
Why host your own repository?
The question of why can be easily social media agency in barueri | digital marketing summed up. Your code is key to your company. If that code is proprietary, you might not want to risk anyone seeing it. Third-party systems are bigger targets because they contain a lot of code. If you want to avoid the possibility of your code falling into the hands of hackers who might then use your own code against you, you should seriously consider a self-hosted code repository.
Self-hosting is also cheaper. If you go with an open-source, free solution, the only thing you’ll pay for is the hardware to host the repository. And considering these solutions can be installed on commodity hardware, that particular cost is generally quite low.
Finally, you don’t have to depend on a WAN connection to work with your repository. Although you probably have a solid network connection to the outside world, when/if that does go down, if your LAN still works, your software engineers can continue working with the repository.
If self-hosting sounds like something you’d like to do, now we get to the how.
How to host your own code repository
There are a number of options available search engine optimization mails to you. One thing you have to understand, however, is that, when choosing this route, you’re going to have to deploy the repository on your own hardware (or on a cloud-hosted service, such as AWS, Google Cloud, Rackspace, or Linode). And some of the available options aren’t exactly the easiest to deploy. However, once you get that repository up and running it will serve you well.