Git Hosting

BioFrontiers IT maintains its own instance of GitLab for everyone at BioFrontiers to use. If you are familiar with GitHub, GitLab is a very similar product, and while they do offer their own hosting like GitHub, they also have a community edition of their product available for self-hosting. The benefit to self-hosting is that without you explicitly enabling public access to a repository, no piece of your code or project is leaving campus resources. It also enables us to give you or your PIs access to all lab members' data even after people leave the lab. This ensures that nobody can prevent access to a project that rightfully belongs to the lab.

Repository Restrictions

By default any user can have 10 projects in GitLab, but that number can be raised as-needed. Users can also create groups, and each group can have 10 projects each. There is no hard restriction on the size of a repository, though we ask that you make good judgement calls and refrain from storing images and other binary data in your Git repository. Storing these types of objects leads to unnecessary bloat.

Backups

biof-git.colorado.edu is part of our highly available virtual machine cluster, and is backed up once daily offsite to protect all repositories against catastrophic hardware failure or natural disasters.