About Heptapod
Heptapod is a community driven effort to bring Mercurial SCM support to GitLab™, started by Octobus, a company providing professional services around Mercurial.
It has a powerful and intuitive Bitbucket import facility.
Heptapod is under active development, check out the roadmap.
Using Heptapod
- Commercial service
- The heptapod.host commercial service entered regular operation in August 2020, after its initial launch as a free public beta in April 2020.
- Free and Open Source Software
- There is a special place in our heart and on our servers for Free and Open Source Software. These projects are welcome free of charge on foss.heptapod.net.
- Self hosting
- Heptapod is itself Open Source: considered a friendly fork of GitLab Community Edition (MIT license), it can be installed and self hosted.
The online services, heptapod.host and foss.heptapod.net are joint efforts by Octobus and the Clever Cloud hosting company.
Resources
Tutorials for end users are available in our FAQ and Documentation area.
FOSDEM 2020 talk about the project and the opening of foss.heptapod.net (13mn).
Abridged history
- Prototype phase (late 2017 to early 2019).
- The first and foremost focus was to demonstrate that modern Mercurial concepts (evolve, topic) could fit GitLab, its branches and merge requests. See the original announcement by Octobus and the demonstration video.
- Stabilization phase (S1 2019).
- Starting from the prototype, making Heptapod usable in practice at several organisations, leading in particular to public self hosting. This is summarized in the presentation at the 2019 Mercurial Paris Conference.
- Experimental phase (S2 2019).
- Longer term developments for better technical integration with GitLab, while maintaining the existing code base. Beginning of efforts to catch up with more recent GitLab versions.