When we started the Google Code project hosting service in 2006, the world of project hosting was limited. We were worried about reliability and stagnation, so we took action by giving the open source community another option to choose from. Since then, we’ve seen a wide variety of better project hosting services such as GitHub and Bitbucket bloom. Many projects moved away from Google Code to those other systems. To meet developers where they are, we ourselves migrated nearly a thousand of our own open source projects from Google Code to GitHub.
As developers migrated away from Google Code, a growing share of the remaining projects were spam or abuse. Lately, the administrative load has consisted almost exclusively of abuse management. After profiling non-abusive activity on Google Code, it has become clear to us that the service simply isn’t needed anymore.
Beginning today, we have disabled new project creation on Google Code. We will be shutting down the service about 10 months from now on January 25th, 2016. Below, we provide links to migration tools designed to help you move your projects off of Google Code. We will also make ourselves available over the next three months to those projects that need help migrating from Google Code to other hosts.
Google will continue to provide Git and Gerrit hosting for certain projects like Android and Chrome. We will also continue maintaining our mirrors of projects like Eclipse, kernel.org and others.
How To Migrate Your Data Off Google Code
The simplest way to migrate off of Google Code is to use the Google Code to GitHub exporter tool, which provides an automated way to migrate a project’s source, issues, and wikis to a new GitHub repo. Please note: GitHub’s importer will convert any Subversion or Mercurial Google Code projects to use Git in the process.
We also offer stand-alone tools for migrating to GitHub and Bitbucket, and SourceForge offers a Google Code project importer service.
If you encounter any problems using these tools, please log issues with us, contact google-code-shutdown@google.com, or email me directly (cdibona@google.com). We’ll also be closely tracking Hacker News, Reddit, and other popular forums to answer questions in public. We know this decision will cause some pain for those of you still using Google Code and we're sorry for that. We'll continue to do our best to make the migration process easy for you.
GitHub and Bitbucket are both looking forward to working with developers moving off of Google Code. They’ve been great to work with leading up to this announcement, so we’d like to thank those sites for their continued support of the community. There are some great options for people today that didn’t exist in 2006, and we look forward to helping you find the one that works for your project.
Chris DiBona, Director of Open Source
