Free alternatives to GitHub?

I’m using BitBucket as a free alternative to GitHub (note: only free because I’m working alone; BitBucket is free for teams with less than 5 people). Is this a good choice, or are there better options? Just wondering what other small teams/solo devs use for source control. For the day that I form a team, I may need to use something different.

I know GitHub’s only $7 per month, but I don’t have a budget to work with, unfortunately.

if your able to host it yourself then I would suggest gitbucket it has amazingly powerful features for free

VSTS from Microsoft is free for teams of less than 5 and has unlimited git and git lfs space, bitbucket is limited in space. So I think VSTS is better.

Just started a new project this weekend with GitLab, been pretty good so far, and you get decent amount of storage per project

You should already be doing that anyways! :smiley:

Of course, there’s always local backups + other online ones :smiley:

There are not many choices available for Unreal (if you use it inside the engine). I tried GitHub, SVN, SourceAnywhere, Plastic SCM, and Perforce. At the end I went with Perforce. I just cannot stand all those extra source control files and directories in every sub-directory of my project. Perforce keeps my project clean. Free for 5 people as well :slight_smile: and it’s used in most game studios. What if I need more licenses? Well, I wish to have that problem.

Huh? There’s no such thing with git, you just need the .git folder and .gitignore file in the root folder. Everything else is clean.

It’s interesting that people think git needs “hosting.”
Git was initially built to work to any host you can “ssh” to.
I have a web host that I use for my personal web pages.
It comes with a shell/ssh login.
I can just put my Git repository backups there.

In Windows command line:
[FONT=Courier New]plink jwatte@myhost.mydomain.com git init --bare some-project.git
git remote add origin jwatte@myhost.domain.com:some-project.git
git push -u origin master

On Mac / Linux, just use “ssh” instead of “plink” (you have to install Putty to get plink, btw.)

You can also do the same with any cloud server you may rent for whatever purposes (VPN, game servers, web servers, etc.)
Amazon Lightsail, Linode, Interserver, Azure, …

is it still true? A new, community-hosted Unreal Engine Wiki - Announcements and Releases - Unreal Engine Forums

Connecting your local git repo up to remote repo

‘git init’ only stores files into a local git repository. To store them on a remote service you have to issue the command line command:
git remote add origin <remote url>
The editor plugin does not handle pushes and pulls, so you will need to use an external tool to keep your project’s remote repo up to date.

Thanks for your answers.

I think I’ll switch to Perforce. After reading about it at the Perforce site, it seems to be a good match for me. I especially like what I read about Perforce being able to handle large files and binaries.

Also, I didn’t realize that the editor plugin only creates a local repository. Guess I’ll have to set up a remote too :stuck_out_tongue:

Edit: I also forgot about creating physical backups…gotta find a way to automate it because I’m not going to remember to do that.