Google Code is shutting down - what should you do next?
By Neil Chue Hong, Director of the Software Sustainability Institute.
Google announced today that their open source project hosting site, Google Code, is to close. The site has disabled the creation of new projects, will turn read-only on 24 August 2015, and will close on 25 January 2016. In the announcement.
Google's Director of Open Source Chris DiBona cited the move of projects away from Google Code to other services such as GitHub and BitBucket - indeed Google itself has moved thousands of its projects to GitHub.
The first thing to stress is: don't panic. Google has provided a long time for you to migrate your project, along with tooling to make the process easier.
For those who have projects hosted on Google Code and want to move to GitHub, a Google Code to GitHub Exporter Tool is available. As part of the export process, only public issues will be transferred across, and all repositories (SVN, Mercurial or Git) will be converted into Git repositories. More details are available in the FAQ.
The closure of Google Code leaves SourceForge as the last remaining large source code hosting site offering Subversion repositories. If you wish to remain with Subversion as your version control system, you can use Sourceforge's Google Code Importer to move yor project - there is also a video tutorial and documentation. This process will maintain the type of version control, but will require some additional steps to ensure that usernames are correctly attached to imported issues/tickets.
If you want to export your project data yourself, Google has also provided guides for manually migrating to other services including GitHub, BitBucket and Sourceforge.
We recommend for all export options that you do this well before the 24 August 2015 read-only deadline, in case you need to make changes to the visibility of code, documentation or issues. You should also keep your community aware of what's going on, so they know where they can find the source code and downloads for your software in the future. Many of these issues are covered in our guide Migrating project resources: what to remember.
Finally, this is a good point to remember to ensure that you are backing up your repositories on a regular basis, and check that the backups can be restored. Whilst Google has given notice of the closure, allowing time for the migration to happen, you might not always get that opportunity.
If you are affected by this closure, you may also be interested in the following Institute guides and blog posts: