Using Git in Enterprise environment

Question

Git is an excellent version control system. If we exclude the fact that, it doesn't have an excellent GUI support, it's really good and fast. But the source controls like Clearcase has large support for enterprise customers. Companies are investing huge amount for source control servers and licesense.

Of late most of the large companies like Google are adopting Git over other version control system. But this company has a strong open source group which consistently provide development and support for the tool (They might even have a custom version of Git of their own). At the same time, large companies are not really bothering about adopting open source projects and making them relevant to them.

• Is Git really a reliable tool for enterprise environment, especially on Windows Platform?
• The support is in question for Git as it's an open source product.
• Are there any company that provides solutions and support? How are the server costs compared to other version controls like Clear-case?

Answer 1

GitHub is NOT a version control -- it "hosts" the version control system called "Git". Aside from the pun, this is a very important difference -- know it well.

Regarding enterprise use, I can tell you that git is as smart (and convenient, and better) as something like SVN. And, you can choose a suitable version control strategy (workflow) based on the size and scope of the project (and your team). Non-distributed systems can't afford you this flexibility.

For Windows, check out Msysgit or Visual Studio Extensions for Git -- git works very well on Windows. Also, windows users look at this training series from TekPub -- it is all Windows.

UPDATE [Feb 2013] getting started with git in visual studio

Your question is not uncommon, and you could google about it and get a lot of text explaining you why and how (and whether) to use git in the enterprise.

• Go read this, this, and this
• look at gitolite project
• look at Git Hosting options
• GitHub, Gitorious and Git Enterprise -- all are good
• look at unfuddle -- it's got free private Git repositories

Still don't like Git? Look at another DVCS called Mercurial.

Answer 2

+1 Mercurial.

Mercurial is cool, is easy, has many user friendly GUIs, and feels more professional. I never understood why Git had such a hype, while other great ones are in the shadow. Mercurial is also supported by google code, bitbucket.org (the equivalent of github), eclipse... I use it since two years and was always happy with it.

Answer 3

I use both Git and Mercurial on Windows, and both are more than usable. I think the GUI tools for Mercurial are better, so if your team is used to visual tools it may be a better fit. I tend to use the commandline though - to me it just makes more sense.

Both, in my experience are bulletproof. You don't need 'support' as such, although I know a lot of enterprises like to have it.

I'm sure there are others, but it's worth having a look at Kiln, which is a hosted mercurial solution.

Please note- regardless of which way you go, DVCS are quite different to traditional VCSs. IMHO, they're superior in almost every way, but it can take some time to get used to.

Answer 4

I know https://github.com/ provides some support with regards to private repositories for enterprises

Specifically they provide a service called firewall install http://fi.github.com/ They claim to provide support but have no details posted online and I have never used them.

Costs are 5000$ per 20 people per year.

Answer 5

git is foreign for Windows developers. It's not a real first class citizen. It does work well, but it's a Linux tool first and foremost. For instance, git's server model pretty much requires SSH logins for security.

Support is a question, and there are companies which can provide, usually accompanied with a hosted solution.

Git is known to not require huge servers - as repositories scale more io capacity and speed is always important, but as most operations happen only on your computer, server requirements are an order of magnitude less than something like Clearcase.

For what its worth, our not quite enterprise company of less than 100 is a huge user of git, on Windows, with Java and C projects.

Answer 6

Git is very different from Clearcase, so the the challenge for you is probably going to be how to smoothly migrate your developers (and other users) to a different way of working with source code and files. Depending on how experienced your users are and how deeply integrated Clearcase is in your enterprise, it may require lots of training and unlearning.

My suggestion initially is that you try out git in a pilot project and see how it works out for your team. Get a secure repository on github and you're all set for the pilot.

Answer 7

• Is Git really a reliable tool for enterprise environment, especially for Windows Platform?

We will soon be at a strong yes with this one. Atlassian recently made big steps towards achieving this with the release of Stash 1.3.

• The support is a question for Git as it's an open source version control.

There is a strong support network of knowledgeable Git users offering advice for free and various LinkedIn groups (Git Version Control System). A quick Google search can usually help with most requirements. For bigger enterprise companies there are also commercial git support options now available on the market today.

• Any companies are there to provide solutions and support? How the server costs comparing to other version controls like Clear-case?

There are a number of companies now offering reliable and dedicated support for Git. Clearvision and #goGit to name one of them.

Answer 8

At my enterprise workplace, I've been working on supporting bringing a team into Mercurial (a similar tool to git) across from ClearCase.

We chose hg in party because its designed around immutability, which is important to our business goals. Also, since it is written in Python, it works very well in Windows. Git has had a reputation for being weaksauce on Windows, and my experience has reflected that. (I gather that tools are better now, I don't use Windows enough anymore to check. :-) ).

The experience has been generally positive, with most of our downsides related to subrepositories and the weird indirections related to them. Another thing is that metadata storage is non-existent in hg; other solutions have to be developed to manage that.

If I was to recommend an enterprise solution for "out of the box" work for Windows developers, I would recommend investigating Kiln and GitHub Firewall.

I know that doesn't directly answer your question. But let me put it this way, if you are used to ClearCase, I expect git to be an order of magnitude easier to train, implement, and administrate.

Answer 9

You may consider to buy a hosted solution like GitEnterprise, which is specifically crafted for this scenario. It delivers a nice web interface to manage your repositories, your users and groups, and security at very fine grained level

1. Security and Access Control We provide read/write access control over repositories and, at branch level, control over READ / CREATE / PUSH / PUSH-FORCE / DELETE right out of the box trough a pleasant web interface. Every access to Git repository is secured via SSL/TLS with FIPS 140-2 certification and SSH Protocol, required for Enterprise-wide source code repositories. GitEnterprise does not rely on the system SSH Server and then does not expose any security risk on the underlying OS. All the external access is centrally audited with ability to extract the information needed for SOX Compliance Report

2. Repository Visualization A web interface is available for repository visualization, and it includes a full repository navigation system based on the popular CGit (http://hjemli.net/git/cgit/ ). A classical repository graph visualization is available as well

3. Simplified Administration The administration is really simple. Everything is done trough a simple web interface. You can import, connect or define your SCM users of your organization, setup security domains and groups, list you repositories, identify users, groups and permissions, create and destroy repositories. Almost everything you can think of is in place, well, at least all the things that were requested to us by our customers until now (but we’re happy to improve!)

4. Gerrit integration Gerrit is fully integrated providing state of the art code review capabilities within GitEnterprise, while mantaining your compliance with SOX.

5. Simplified integration GitEnterprise can be easily integrated to existing corporate system for authentication such as LDAP, including also Microsoft ActiveDirectory.

GitEnterprise (http://gitenterprise.com) is also available on a freemium base: you can get a 10 users / 1GB account for free. We encourage everyone to give it a try and provide us some feedback!