Share your code with the world: introducing Kiln public repositories
December 16th, 2010 by Benjamin Pollack
A lot of Kiln features come about because we have an itch to scratch. In fact, the very idea of Kiln arose because I wanted to be able to stop asking sysadmins to make new repositories for us and Tyler wanted a code review tool that didn’t stink. Then, our JSON API came about because customers wanted to be able to build on top of the great foundation that Kiln provided. Then, code search happened because it had become so easy to put everything into source control that we were having trouble finding anything. Finally, our increasing movement to allow code reviews to float among related repositories has been driven by a mix of internal and external desire to make them ever more flexible.
But there’s one feature that few customers have asked for, but that we feel is really important: making it very easy to share your source code with others. Open-source projects are extremely common these days. Many companies, including Fog Creek, share a lot of code with the broader community. While Kiln provides a whole host of tools that would make doing open-source development a lot easier, most projects didn’t want to use Kiln for one key reason: you needed to log in to Kiln to view source code. While that’s what you want 99.9% of the time, it can be a real bear when you’re just trying to share open-source code with your customers or the community at large.
We were initially nervous about how to implement this feature. We wanted to make it easy to share code with others, but we also wanted it to be impossible to accidentally make private code public. After playing with a few different designs, we settled on one that we believe makes a lot of sense, keeping your private code fully secure while making it really easy to share what you want to be public.
So we’re thrilled to announce a brand-new feature in Kiln 2.2: Public Projects. All repositories located in a public project can be accessed by anyone with a web browser; no log-in required. Visitors to your site can see a customized version of Kiln’s activity feed that lists only activity that’s been going on in public projects. They can subscribe to the RSS feed to stay abreast of updates, browse through your code, use Kiln’s phenomenal repository search, and clone the code to their local machines. Public projects are prominently labeled, making them hard to miss. And because you can only make things public at a project level, you never have to worry about accidentally exposing your work to the world as you reorganize a project or work in the permissions pane. We really believe it’s the best of both worlds.
There’s no better way to explain this feature than to show it off. So, as of today, we’d also like to announce the Kiln Mirrors Project, located at http://mirrors.kilnhg.com. The Mirrors Project hosts mirrors of a variety of open-source projects, such as the Python programming language and Mercurial itself. It’s not only a convenient place to grab copies of your favorite open-source software; it’s also a really easy way to see what Kiln offers without even signing up for a trial. If you like what you see, and you’re an open-source project, don’t forget that Kiln has a free edition for up to two users, and we’re generally happy to expand that for genuine all-volunteer open-source projects. It’s very easy to get started.
Happy coding!
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