Google’s Open Source Blog recently announced that they are shutting down Google Code. Launched back in 2006, coders and developers hosted their open source initiatives and projects here, taking advantage of the reliability offered by this service. And since then, many other project hosting services kept coming that were not only better but also made it easier to host and collaborate on projects.
Google Code will be shutting down on 25 January, 2015
The decision to shut down the service came after they found most of the remaining projects hosted on Google Code to be either spam or abuse, and a large part of the administrative load was spent on abuse management. So to begin with, they have disabled the creation of new projects. On 24th August, 2015, the projects will go readonly (only download, view project source, but no changes) and by 25 January, 2016, the hosting service will be completely closed down (you will still be able to download a tarball of your project sources throughout the rest of 2016).
If you have your projects hosted on Google Code, there are tools that make it easier to migrate your projects to other hosting services which you can check out from the following link http://dgit.in/GoogCodeMigr. Among the good ones, here are a few that you might want to consider checking out.
GitHub
GitHub is clearly the most popular code and project hosting service out there. GitHub caters to the needs of both individual developer communities as well as enterprises hosting their software. The service is free for basic users and at a few dollars per month, it provides many professional features also. In their official announcement of the shutdown notice, Google even mentioned GitHub and about its exporting tool.
SourceForge
Another popular alternative to host your projects, SourceForge is now managed by a group of volunteers and admins who love the service. It sees many highly popular open source projects and software that are still based on this service, since it offers efficient issue tracking and management of different versions of your projects. But currently users have been reporting adware being bundled in all of its installers, making it really hard to consider. SourceForge also has an exporter tool for Google Code.
Bitbucket
Bitbucket offers a free service with access to infinite cloud repositories so that you can go about building your own project with a plethora of available resources. It is free for up to five users, and the service intends to provide its features to people working for projects in a team — startups and smaller organisations and not exactly for individual developers. The service consists of Jira, a popular issue tracking software made by the same team behind Bitbucket. Again, Bitbucket has a migration tool to export your projects from Google Code.
