DigitalOcean App Platform

I was really excited about this when I got the email a few weeks ago with a beta invite but after two minutes I realised I’d be unable to use it, and still can’t now it’s launched...

Why oh why is GitHub now considered the single place where code lives? Even as alternative providers gain in popularity.

It’s really sad to see DigitalOcean requiring this for some reason.

Please either allow use of arbitrary Git repositories (e.g. self-hosted GitLab in my use case) or provide a stand-alone CLI tool to enable deployment of anything, like Firebase does.

Disappointing so far.

From article:

> You can deploy the source code directly from your GitHub repositories (support for GitLab and Bitbucket is coming soon).

Naming specific git hosts suggests it may not be available on "arbitrary Git repositiories" in the near future, but looks like they are at least planning to broaden the options for where to have your code live

Such a weird approach that seems repeated by many. Instead of building something general that works for most cases and is easier to implement, they focus on specialized cases of specific SCM platforms.

If they started with support Git Remotes and then supporting specific platforms, they would have covered all use cases from the get-go, albeit with slightly poorer UX.

But instead they chose to only support specific platforms, missing plenty of people who actually want to use this, but can't.

Git remotes is certainly not "easier to implement". You need to have ssh infrastructure setup to receive the repository, deal with key management, provide the user some way to input ssh keys, etc. Contrast that with GitHub web hooks + API and I can see why they didn't bother.

I bet GitHub covers the vast majority of their target users.