The world’s largest open source foundation has successfully completed the migration of its Git service to GitHub.
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer community that oversees more than 350 open source projects and initiatives, has completed its infrastructure support expansion by migrating its Git service to GitHub, the Microsoft-owned code management platform.
The move would allow the ASF community to make full use of GitHubs tools.
Before integrating with GitHub, Apache projects had two version control services available via ASF Infrastructure: Apache Subversion and Git.
Over the years, increasing number of projects and their communities wanted to make their code available on GitHub as well. But as they could only host read-only mirrors on GitHub, the ability to use GitHub’s tools around those repositories was limited, the foundation explained.
In 2016, Apache started integrating GitHub’s repository and tooling with their own services. By February 2019, the foundation was able to successfully move all Git projects to GitHub, enabling all these projects to host on a simple platform so that they can review, collaborate and build software alongside 31 million developers around the world who use Github.
“Over time, we improved, debugged and solidified this integration. In late 2018, we asked all projects to move away from our internal Git service to that provided by GitHub. This shift brought all of their tooling to our projects, while we maintain a backup mirror on our infrastructure,” said Greg Stein, ASF Infrastructure Administrator, in an official statement.
After completing the migration to GitHub, the ASF decommissioned its Git service in February 2019.
The focus is now on building software and community
GitHub director of product Bryan Clarke wrote in a blog post, “We’re grateful to have such an impactful foundation migrate and grow directly on GitHub. With this transition completed, Apache can focus on building software and their community.”
“Whether we’re working with individual Open Source maintainers and contributors or some of the world’s largest Open Source foundations like Apache, GitHub’s mission is to be the home for all developers by supporting Open Source communities, addressing their unique needs, and helping Open Source projects thrive,” he added.
As the world’s largest Open Source foundation, the ASF’s 200M+ lines of code are overseen by an all-volunteer community of 730 individual ASF members and 7,000 Apache code committers. Over its 20-year history, 1,058,321,099 lines of code have been committed across 3,022,836 code commits.
Why the move to a closed source service when you have GitLab which you can even selfhost? GitHub tooling is so broken up and suboptimal in comparison to GitLab.