Buildbot vs Gitolite: What are the differences?
Developers describe Buildbot as "Python-based continuous integration testing framework". BuildBot is a system to automate the compile/test cycle required by most software projects to validate code changes. By automatically rebuilding and testing the tree each time something has changed, build problems are pinpointed quickly, before other developers are inconvenienced by the failure. On the other hand, Gitolite is detailed as "Setup git hosting on a central server, with fine-grained access control". Gitolite allows you to setup git hosting on a central server, with fine-grained access control and many more powerful features. Gitolite is an access control layer on top of git.
Buildbot belongs to "Continuous Integration" category of the tech stack, while Gitolite can be primarily classified under "Code Collaboration & Version Control".
Some of the features offered by Buildbot are:
- run builds on a variety of slave platforms
- arbitrary build process: handles projects using C, Python, whatever
- minimal host requirements: Python and Twisted
On the other hand, Gitolite provides the following key features:
- Use a single unix user ("real" user) on the server.
- Provide access to many gitolite users: they are not "real" users, so they do not get shell access.
- Control access to many git repositories: read access controlled at the repo level, and write access controlled at the branch/tag/file/directory level, including who can rewind, create, and delete branches/tags.
"Highly configurable builds" is the primary reason why developers consider Buildbot over the competitors, whereas "Easy setup" was stated as the key factor in picking Gitolite.
Buildbot and Gitolite are both open source tools. It seems that Gitolite with 7.45K GitHub stars and 960 forks on GitHub has more adoption than Buildbot with 4K GitHub stars and 1.37K GitHub forks.
