About Heptapod
Heptapod has proven to be usable for Mercurial and Git projects,
Georges Racinet - Heptapod maintainer and release manager
and to be the platform of choice in the case of Mercurial.
The Heptapod story
In 2018, before the Bitbucket forge dropped Mercurial support (final removal of all Mercurial projects happened in 2020), we decided to make a community driven friendly fork of GitLab™ that would be able to handle both Git and Mercurial.
The goal was to provide a trusty solution for Mercurial based projects and set up an European based hosting platform for source code.
Heptapod has proven to be usable for Mercurial and Git projects, and to be the platform of choice in the case of Mercurial.
An Heptapod for everyone
Beside being Open Source software that end users and organizations can host for themselves, the Heptapod project provides two online source code and DevOps hosting plaforms:
Heptapod FOSS, foss.heptapod.net
A public software forge which is free of charge for Free and Open Source Software (FOSS).
Heptapod Cloud, heptapod.host
Heptapod Cloud at heptapod.host for the more general public, e.g., private repositories.
Heptapod Self-Hosted
Heptapod is a Free and Open Source software that you can self hosted in various ways.
The people and companies behind Heptapod
These two online services are joint efforts by Octobus and Clever Cloud.
Clever Cloud is a French hosting company whith a strong focus on data sovereignty through multiple data centers in Europe.
The partnership between Octobus and Clever Cloud takes precisely its roots from those very shared values of freedom for free software, data management with respect, openness, interoperability and no vendor lock-in at no price.
Clever Cloud is the hosting half of the partnership behind heptapod.host.
They help companies and IT professionals to achieve software delivery faster, reduce their feedback loop, focus on their core value and stop worrying about their hosting infrastructure by providing a solution for application sustainability.
Octobus is the software half of the partnership behind Heptapod Cloud and Heptapod software.
They provide commercial support for Mercurial, a free, distributed source control management tool.
Heptapod features
Activity-Based Pricing
Only pay for active users.
Git Hosting
Heptapod has the full Git hosting capabilities of its GitLab Core foundation.
Mercurial Hosting
Access your Mercurial repository through HTTPS, SSH or the Web UI.
Easy and Safe History Mutation
Use Mercurial as you have for 15 years, or start collaborating on drafts using the topic and evolve extensions.
Project Management Features
GitLab basic features are fully integrated:
merge requests,
issues tracker, milestones and boards
GitLab Pages
Easily build and publish static websites under heptapod.io directly from Git or Mercurial repository with free HTTPS certificate
Integrated On-Demand CI/CD
Pre-configured CI runners can get spawned on-demand and billed based on your actual usage. You can also use your own runners if you prefer so.
Container Registry
Host your Container images close to your code (Docker or any OCI image). Access your private images with the same credentials as your code, notably from CI.
| Category | Feature | Support | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Access control | Group based | Yes | |
| Project based | Yes | ||
| Subgroups | Yes | ||
| Mercurial & Git access: clone, push, pull |
HTTPS | Yes | With Personal Access Tokens |
| SSH | Yes | ||
| Mercurial workflow | Merge-request from named branch | Yes | With immutable changesets. |
| Merge-request from topic branch | Yes | With mutable draft changeset | |
| Merging MR from the command line | Yes | ||
| Merging MR from the Web UI | Yes | With merge if needed, linear and semi-linear options | |
| Other Web, UI branch, Manipulations | No | ||
| Some MR actions | No | E.g. cherry-pick | |
| Protected branches | Yes | ||
| Project forks | No | ||
| Project Management | Issues | Yes | |
| Milestones | Yes | ||
| Board | Yes | ||
| Wikis | Yes | ||
| Email notifications | Notifications | Yes | |
| Comment by reply | Yes | ||
| Integration | Mattermost | Yes | External, not provided on heptapod.host |
| External issue tracker, CI Bots, etc. | Unclear | Some work only for Git projects. Contact us for more details. | |
| Import | From generic Mercurial or Git URL | Yes | |
| From another Heptapod or GitLab instance | Yes | ||
| Full imports from other forges implemented in GitLab | Partial | Git only | |
| Multiple, specified as a manifest file | Partial | Mercurial only | |
| Continuous Integration | User managed runners | Yes | |
| Clever-Cloud managed runners | Yes | Provided and billed on-demand | |
| Continuous Deployment | Unclear | Needs user feedback | |
| Auto-devops | Unclear | Needs user feedback | |
| Hosting | Build Artifacts | Yes | Need to lift various size limits and probably S3-like storage |
| Container Registry | Yes | ||
| GitLab Pages | Yes | Host static websites under heptapod.io | |
| Authentication | Clever Cloud SSO | Yes | |
| SSO | No | Other than Clever Cloud's on heptapod.host | |
| 2FA push/pull | Yes | with Personal Access Tokens | |
| Advanced Mercurial features | Changeset Evolution | Yes | |
| Topic branches | Yes | ||
| LFS | Needs Work | Large binary objects | |
| Narrow clones | No | ||
| Clone bundles | Needs Work |
