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Bitbucket support for Mercurial repositories will stop in June 2020.

After much consideration, we've decided to remove Mercurial support from Bitbucket Cloud and its API. Mercurial features and repositories will be officially removed from Bitbucket and its API on June 1, 2020.

Source here

I was using private Mercurial repositories from there, also shared with several users, teams and projects. I was using issues too.

Do you know any other service like that? Or do you recommend to go to Git repos instead?

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  • Is gratis a requirement? If so, it will be hard to find offers for private repos. You could always attempt to self-host, though (Heptapod, Phabricator, OpenProject, RhodeCode, sourcehut, and the somewhat outdated Kallithea ... a 2013 fork of RhodeCode without much progress since). Dec 13, 2019 at 8:09
  • RhodeCode is preparing a hosted offering that will be launching in beta beginning of 2020. Dec 13, 2019 at 10:44
  • @marcinkuzminski I the main feature missing for me is a Wiki using the same VCS as the main repo for a project. RhodeCode looks really neat otherwise. Right now nothing seems to exist which offers all functionality Bitbucket offered at the same level ... Apr 14, 2020 at 20:26

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To add to "own instances" option:

Octobus are developing Mercurial support for GitLab and have pretty good progress on that.

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  • True, and I've been contemplating moving there. Their latest update even made huge progress on Bitbucket imports. However, there is one big downside at the moment: seemingly no support for both Mercurial and Git. I can do without Subversion, but because of the adoption rate of Git it's hard to get around that. Dec 13, 2019 at 8:06
  • From what I read, Heptapod is internally implemented on top of git-hg bridge, so in theory supporting both VCS's shouldn't be hard. This is certainly not a priority for devs, however.
    – arrowd
    Dec 13, 2019 at 19:09
  • yep, exactly. And the GitLab devs themselves don't consider Hg a priority of their own, so it's an uphill battle, basically. I am still unsure on which one I'm going to bet ... RhodeCode, Phabricator, OpenProject, sourcehut (self-hosted) or Heptapod. But out of these Heptapod seems to be the most limiting when you want more than just Hg. I mean I love Hg, but I am realistic enough to have accepted the hegemony of the mediocre tool that Git (via its CLI) is. Dec 13, 2019 at 19:13
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  1. Don't migrate to Git. "Git is pain" for hg-users
  2. You can try to read about different hg-hosting

or try

or run

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    I wholeheartedly agree with the first statement. Git isn't just pain for Hg users but also for Git users. It's just that so many people use UIs that hide the intricacies of Git (and whole concepts) which made Git great (and GitHub of course). Most Git users hardly seem to get beyond the commit, push, pull routine. Dec 13, 2019 at 8:15
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In addition to the existing answer, I wanted to point out an alternative that has just recently "joined" the market.

How suitable this is for you, depends on the level of private your repositories were on Bitbucket. I know they were offering non-public repositories, if that's what you mean.

If you are looking to host your FOSS project publicly foss.heptapod.net may be the way to go. It lacks the Wiki feature its parent project GitLab offers. Alternatively OSDN also offers Mercurial hosting. But again, only in public as far as I know.

If, however, you want true self-hosting you should look at the list provided in the other answer.

Let me pick out a few good candidates from that list. Good as far as I am concerned:

Phabricator

Phabricator appears to be the best candidate overall as it seems to offer most of the Bitbucket functionality. It is currently my favorite in the race of migrating my repositories. The only bitter pill I found so far was the fact that the Wiki doesn't seem to be a VCS repository in its own right and that the dialect used by that Wiki is ... well, non-standard.

RhodeCode

Rhodecode comes in a Community and Enterprise Edition. The Community Edition can be self-hosted. Several of the features are very enticing indeed, but I didn't find the installation at all easy to do and it lacks some features I deem relevant for myself. Most importantly a Wiki. On the other hand it may offer features such as LDAP/AD authentication which are more relevant to others.

Heptapod

Heptapod is a friendly fork of GitLab and provided under the same liberal license (MIT). The Wiki support isn't there yet, but it comes with support for importing projects from Bitbucket. The lack of Wiki (at this point) may be a deal breaker for some. On the other hand one can simply clone the Wiki off of Bitbucket and add it to a Heptapod project when it gains the feature.

As far as I can tell this isn't lossy, because the Git repo used by Heptapod is merely there to allow the "GitLab" machinery to see the changesets without too many changes. It's a quite clever solution for the problem at hand, given the time constraints.

NB: If you have run GitLab, you know that this is quite a heavy machinery compared to, say, Gitea. But it also comes with loads of features.

Apache Allura

Apache Allura to the best of my knowledge is either derived from or heavily inspired by the software on which SourceForge originally ran. This feature comparison chart may also offer a few pointers to further (self-hosted) alternatives.

Personally I am leaning towards Phabricator at the moment, simply because it gives me features such as code review as well and even though the Wiki is in a different dialect, in the long run it'll be worth it to migrate.

But your mileage may vary.


If there's one thing that whole Bitbucket debacle has taught me it's not to rely on some commercial offer, even if it comes gratis. I will likely still offer mirrors of my projects on other sites, but the main one will be self-hosted.

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  • since we really think our installation is one of the easiest from the existing tools could you please share your thoughts why you find it not easy? We'd love to learn how to improve even further on that topic. Apr 15, 2020 at 7:22

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