GitBusiness.com

GitBusiness.com
Type of site	Hosted git repository service
Company	GITBusiness.com Inc.
Founded by	Stan Switaj
Headquarters	Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
URL	gitbusiness.com
Written in	Python 3
Database	PostgreSQL
Web servers	nginx and Apache
Payments	PayPal
Commercial	Yes — monthly subscription
Current status	Active

GitBusiness.com is a hosted git source-code management service that Stan Switaj programmed from idea to implementation. Customers subscribe to a storage plan and receive private and public git repositories, a web interface for browsing every repository, and full command-line access over HTTPS. It is operated by GITBusiness.com Inc. and its front page describes it as hosted git for business, on the business idea of source-code management done properly.

The service is one of the websites Switaj founded and programmed from 2020 onward. Its source code is proprietary, though uses the opensource git and its web based component.

Plans

Subscriptions are monthly and are distinguished by total repository storage rather than by feature tiers; every plan includes command-line access and both private and public repositories:

• Basic — $9.99, up to 2 GB, marketed as the getting-started plan
• Silver — $45, 50 GB
• Gold — $100, up to 200 GB
• Platinum — $250, up to 750 GB, with premium customer support included

Within a plan the number of repositories is unlimited, as is the number of teammates a customer may allow to collaborate on a repository; the storage figure is the only ceiling. An earlier free tier has been retired and is no longer offered or accepted anywhere in the signup path.

Internally a plan is a short string identifier carried from the front page into account creation and finally recorded against the customer's account, and the same identifier has to be recognised by the signup page, the account-creation endpoint and the price table alike before a subscription can complete.

Repositories and access

Each customer is given three repository areas — private, public, and a combined view of both — created on the server when the account is provisioned. Repositories can be browsed through a web interface offering a summary, shortlog, log and tree view for each project, and cloned, fetched and pushed over HTTPS from the command line in the ordinary way, so no proprietary client is required.

Access is controlled by two different passwords depending on what is being done. Browsing a repository through the web interface is authenticated against the customer's own account password, while git operations — cloning, fetching and pushing — are authenticated against a password held per repository. A consequence of that design is that a repository with no such record cannot be cloned at all: there is no password for the request to match, so the repository is simply unreachable rather than exposed.

Repositories are ordinary git repositories on disk, which means a customer's work is not locked inside a proprietary format and can be copied directly on the server that holds it.

Signing up and payment

Account creation validates the username, password, telephone number and a pair of matching email addresses, rejecting a username already in use, and requires a password of at least eight characters containing a digit and a punctuation character. Payment is taken through PayPal.

The order of operations is deliberate: the account record is written first, but the subscription record is not. That is written only once PayPal confirms the payment, so an account is never marked as subscribed before it has been paid for. Anything not present in the service's price table is rejected before payment is attempted at all.

Once payment is confirmed, provisioning runs: the customer's repository directories are created, the per-customer web-interface configuration is written, the web server's own configuration is regenerated to include the new customer, and the server is reloaded so the change takes effect without a restart. A welcome message is emailed to the customer and a notification to the company. The mail step is written so that it cannot hold up or undo the rest — an early version of the service could create the account, its directories and its configuration in full and then time out on an unreachable mail server, presenting the customer with an error for a signup that had in fact succeeded.

The per-customer configuration is generated rather than maintained by hand. Each account contributes its own blocks to the web server's configuration file, written afresh on every signup, so a customer missing the underlying settings record is silently omitted from it — their repositories remaining on disk but becoming unreachable over the web.

Signing out

Because repository access uses HTTP Basic authentication, which has no concept of signing out — a browser re-sends cached credentials on every request, in a form indistinguishable from freshly typed ones — GitBusiness implements logout with a one-shot marker. Logging out deletes the session and records the marker; the next browsing request finds it, removes it, and refuses the request whatever password accompanies it, which makes the browser present its login prompt again. The credentials typed into that prompt arrive with no marker outstanding and are checked normally.

The mechanism is deliberately confined to the web-browsing URLs. Applying it to git operations would break every fetch and push made after a web logout, since a git client has no session and no way to answer a login prompt.

Technology

GitBusiness is written in Python 3 as CGI, with no web framework. Requests arrive over HTTPS at nginx, which terminates the encryption and passes them to an Apache instance that runs the CGI scripts and serves the git and web-interface endpoints, forwarding the visitor's address so that logs record the visitor rather than the proxy. Page addresses are extension-less, mapped onto their scripts by rewrite rules.

Storage is two PostgreSQL databases, one holding accounts, sessions and subscriptions and the other the site's own content. Pages share code through an include helper that executes a shared file into the page's namespace, so shared modules and pages see one another's variables — a pattern used consistently across Switaj's Python projects. Errors are written to a server-side log directory rather than shown to visitors.

The service's credentials — database, mail, and the payment and third-party keys — are kept outside the application's own tree and have never been committed to its git history, and the project's release archives deliberately exclude both those credentials and the contact-form submissions, which contain customers' real email addresses and telephone numbers. The archives do retain the repository history itself.

History

The source code carries a 2020 copyright in the name of GitBusiness.com Inc., with Switaj as owner and chief executive, and the public site carries a copyright range running from 2021 to 2026, placing the service among the earliest of his businesses. It has been developed and maintained continuously since, with versioned archives kept for each release.

In 2023 Switaj set out to consolidate GitBusiness with BestInternetSearch and UltraHot.TV into a single company, which was incorporated as Ultrazon Inc. on May 6, 2024. GitBusiness.com remains in operation under its own name.

Contact

The company publishes a sales address of sales@gitbusiness.com and a telephone number of +1 800-250-8983, and gives its location as Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

See also

• Stan Switaj
• Ultrazon Inc.
• BestInternetSearch.com
• UltraHot.TV

External links

• GitBusiness.com — official website