Stash repository structure for project with multiple applications

[Michael Smith]

We're looking to migrate from SVN/Jenkins/Mantis to Stash/Bamboo/JIRA. We typically have 3-5 Java webapps in a project built using Maven, along with one or two .NET Windows apps also built with Maven, and the whole set is released together in a unified deployment.

Should we create a single Stash project with a single Git repo for each project, and a single Bamboo plan to build it all?

Or multiple repositories under a Stash project, one repo per webapp?

The automatic branching features in Stash, Bamboo and JIRA seem to be optimized for a single repo being the common case.

[Marcin Gardias · Accepted solution]

I would say it boils down to answer to 2 simple questions: are webapps from single project often changed together? If you go with single repo per project would the size of it become a problem?

If the answer to first is 'yes' and second 'no' then I would go with single repository.

As you said, branching in Bamboo is optimized for single repository case. I also find it personally much more convienient if I don't have to look for components of single project in 5 different places ;-) But YMMV.

[cofarrell]

Just to add to Marcin's comment.

This is an area that IMHO still has some room for improvement (you might be interested in this recent blog from a colleague of mine).

Marcin is right - generally tooling, including Stash/Maven/Bamboo/Everything work better with a single repository. The longer you can stick with that the most comfortable off you'll be. There are two places where this becomes a real problem (which is what Marcin is really talking about with 'size' above)

1. You need to 'share' a single repository/library/module/product with more than one repository. At this point you need to use Maven/Git-Submodule/Git-Subtree to 'depend' on the other repository.

2. Build speed - the maven build of a single repository becomes unwieldy/horrible and you want to improve performance.

Again, if you don't have either of those problems then having a single repository is almost always the easiest.

Cheers,

Charles

PS. FWIW I think this is solvable, but we need to ditch Maven first. :)

[Michael Smith]

Thanks for the blog links - it was interesting reading.