In 2017, the French Octobus team made an observation: Git is gaining power in the Concurrent Version Systems’ field (CVS), helped by proprietary platforms such as GitHub or open platforms such as GitLab. This gradually discouraged users who abandoned competing solutions and communities.
This was notably the case with Mercurial, whose users wanted to take advantage of the benefits while using a modern project management solution. An idea was to adapt the community edition of GitLab to Mercurial.
Heptapod was born. The tool, open source, was developed during two years before a first demonstration, then stabilized. It entered its production phase in 2020. At this time Georges Racinet, project maintainer, met Clever Cloud and this led to the creation of our first hosted service: heptapod.host.
We were regularly asked for forges as a complement to our offer and our CI/CD solutions, allowing our customers to deploy in France, with the simplicity and efficiency of the Clever Cloud platform, without being dependent on a third-party, proprietary solution, whose conditions can change overnight.
Heptapod seemed to us to be the perfect fit to meet this need: it is a full GitLab offering, with the possibility of using Mercurial as a CVS for those who want it. Most importantly, it allows us to deploy our own features with ease, as with the recently implemented runners.
Hosting of open source projects can be offered for free. You can also take advantage of a maximum of 1 GB and 100 public users at no cost. Beyond that or for private users/repositories, you will be charged at the current rate.
You can use Heptapod now, the only thing you need is a Clever Cloud account.