Some thoughts on Source Control Management for XPages development

In my career as a Domino developer I have been playing with various Source Control Managent solutions already. I used TeamStudio Ciao! for many many years and this tool proved to be a life saver in many occasions already. So I owe some drinks to the guys from TeamStudio... (don't tell them!!)

Since IBM started opening Domino Designer in Release 8.5.3 (was it 8.5.2 ???) towards the "standard" SCM systems (Git, SVN, Mercurial) I have been playing with these options a lot. There was quite some pain involved, I lost source code, my repositories lost the link to the NSF/ODP, etc... No pain, no gain! The good news for me: Today I have a working environment which fits my needs :-)
My first steps were with SVN, but I admit that I was not able to get this setup running properly. Additionally, I was not too happy about the centralized approach. That said I started using Mercurial. Finally I ended up using Git, first the implementation in Domino Designer and nowadays using SourceTree. This setup provides me with such a high flexibility with regards to my work-related projects as well with my pet-projects.

The last missing bit so far was a proper SCM system. I have been looking around for a while and playing with various systems. As I am a corporate developer, using a hosted environment was not an option at all. So I was looking for a solution to run my self-hosted SCM server for my code coming from both, work-related projects as well as pet-projects. Finally, I think my journey has ended successfully (or at least I have reached an intermediate stop). I have played with GitLabHQ for a a while now and it looks very promising to me. I got it up and running relatively painless on a local Ubuntu VM. If you are looking for a self-hosted SCM server, I can highly recommend looking into GitLab (it is very focussed on SCM though).
There is a lot of useful information available in- and outside the XPages community. In the upcoming weeks I will describe my environment and approaches and specifically GitLab a little more in detail and hopefully add some more useful bits. So stay tuned!