NEW YORK: Google is going to shut down its programming project hosting service, Google Code. Google Code was launched in 2006 and was one of the first websites that allowed users to host their code online and share them with the world. Nearly a decade has passed and better project hosting services such as GitHub and Bitbucket have become developer favourites.
GitHub has become so popular that in spite of having its own code hosting service, Google has migrated nearly a thousand of its open source projects to GitHub. Ever since Google Code went into obscurity it has fallen prey to rampant spam and abuse. Google says that the administrative load on its side only comprises of abuse management. Google painstakingly removed the spam and realised that there was very less useful content on the website. So it decided to shut Google Code down as soon as possible.
Google isn’t allowing users to create new projects since yesterday on the Google Code website. On August 24, 2015 all the content will become read only and users will be requested to take out their data. In 2016 on January 25th the website will cease to exist. Users will still be able to download a tarball of project source, issues, and wikis all through 2016. Google is offering a better alternative of retrieving your data on Google Code and that is migration to other websites. Google has released a Google Code to GitHub exporter tool that migrate a project’s source, issues, and wikis to a new GitHub repo automatically. If you are not interested in taking your project to GitHub, Google will allow users to migrate their data to other websites like Bitbucket and SourceForge.
