Google Code Is Shutting Down, Gives Way To Github

In 2008, Google said Mercurial had an advantage over Git due to its "efficient HTTP transport protocol". They may have been right — in 2008. At the time, Google also said Git was "more powerful, but this tends to be offset by it being more complicated to use". Now that we're in 2015, Google is admitting defeat, and is shuttering their online project hosting portal, Google Code. Starting today, new product creation is disabled, and the site will go read-only in August.

Before we jump into it, here's Google's timeline for Google Code:

March 12, 2015 – New project creation disabled.

August 24, 2015 – The site goes read-only. You can still checkout/view project source, issues, and wikis.

January 25, 2016 – The project hosting service is closed. You will be able to download a tarball of project source, issues, and wikis. These tarballs will be available throughout the rest of 2016.

Started in 2006, Google Code was the company's overarching effort to get Developers to use their portal for sharing and working on projects. At the time, it was a solid option. With the rise of services like Github, though, Google Code is an also-ran.

The teams within Google weren't even using Google Code much. To meet Developers on their chosen platform, Google ported many of their own open source projects to Github. Over time, Google Code became a forum for "spam or abuse", according to Google.

Developers who have projects on Google Code can use Google's 'Export to Github' tool to ease projects off the server.

Source: Google