Yesterday I blogged a list of some of my favourite open source projects. I thought it was also worth blogging some of my favourite services/software with free offerings for open source projects that make it much easier or cheaper for open source projects to exist, collaborate and build great software.

I’ve tried to limit the list to things I have first-hand experience of or seem popular amongst people I follow on social networks; but there’s a chance there are omissions. Ping me on Twitter if you think there’s something I should really add.

Source Code Hosting

  • GitHub - Git source code hosting; issue tracker and web page hosting. By far the most popular/active for open source projects right now.
  • Codeplex - Git, TFS and Mercurial source code hosting, issue tracker, wiki. Needs a bit of love, to be honest!
  • BitBucket - Git and Mercurial source code hosting. BitBucket has free private repos too (so isn’t just free for open source). I used to use this quite a lot until GitHub got so popular that it was hard to ignore!
  • Google Code - Git, Mercurial and Subversion. Doesn’t seem to be much here these days; mostly just dead projects. Even lots of Google’s own OSS is hosted on GitHub!
  • Kiln/FogBugz - Whilst this isn’t strictly for open source; Kiln and FogBugz are free for two users and supports “community users” for public access. I couldn’t not include this; it’s my favourite DVCS hosting and includes a great Code Review system.

Web App Hosting

  • Azure - Host 10 web apps for free; though you’ll need to pay for custom domains.
  • AppHarbor - A .NET PaaS (Platform as a Service) provider. When first launched, this service made Azure look incredibly clunky and complicated for simple web apps, and used to host the website for G+ Notifier for free under their OSS program.

Hosted Continuous Integration / Deployment

  • Travis CI - This seems to be getting more and more popular for GitHub projects, possibly down to really nice integration that allows running tests and reporting pass/fail status in pull requests automatically!
  • BuildHive - Powered by Jenkins, also with easy integration with GitHub.
  • CodeBetter CI - Powered by Team City.
  • Bamboo - From Atlassian; also available for download.

Testing

  • Sauce Labs - Run your web and mobile app tests across hundreds of real browsers and platforms.
  • BrowserStack JavaScript Testing - An HTTP-based API that can be used to open any URL in any combination of browser/OS on BrowserStack to execute JavaScript tests.

Other Development Software / Web Apps

Misc

  • GoDaddy SSL Certificates - I’m not sure there’s much for love for these guys, but they are claiming to give free SSL certs for OSS.
  • Crowdin - Localisation platform to help manage your translations.
  • BugSense - Analytics software for catching and collating errors in mobile apps.

After posting this; I was tweeted a link to ossperks.com, a similar (but more-complete) list of free stuff for Open Source projects. If you’re running an OSS project, Irecommend checking it out!