Assembla became known as the world's best Subversion host, but during the past four years we have added great git workflows, and we rely on them for all of our own development. This article answers some questions that we got recently about where to use Assembla git, instead of Github or Gerrit or Stash. Please contact us if you need help getting started.
WHY USE ASSEMBLA?
Assembla is designed to build the “team” in distributed team. Assembla gives you a team-oriented way to use git. You can put all of the branches and repositories in one workspace, with shared team permissions, one activity stream, and full visibility for new and existing team members.
Assembla is great if you create a lot of new projects, apps, and sites. The "space" container increases maintainability by putting everything for a project in one place - code, documentation, tickets, history, team, FTP or SSH deploy, and extra tabs that can contain build and monitoring tools. You get started quickly, you can always come back for enhancements, you never lose anything, and you can hand off to new team members and contractors, or make an extremely complete and professional delivery to clients.
FEATURES and WORKFLOWS
Assembla links code commits and merge requests to a ticket (or issue). You can see a complete history of the changes that affect a ticket.
You can ALSO see a list if the tickets that were affected by a merge request or a list of merges. This gives you automated release notes for a continuous delivery process.
Assembla implements the complete Github-style individual coding workflow. Developers can make an individual branch or repository. They can submit pull requests (called merge requests). They can review, comment, accept, or reject merges. They can use @mention and @mention! to call for reviews or post comments for specific team members.
Assembla also implements a Gerrit-style workflow which is often better for big teams or full-time teams. In the Gerrit-style workflow, team members start from a shared master branch, and they make temporary branches to review specific changes. This unifies the team and removes the work that team members have to do to maintain their own repositories. Assembla has automated this workflow to simplify the Gerrit or “branch per ticket” flow. The master branch can be marked as “protected”. When team members push changes to the master branch, Assembla automatically creates a temporary branch to test and review the change.
Assembla has a full API and Jenkins integration so that you can run continuous integration on review branches, merge requests, and master branches. Jenkins can even be added as an Assembla tab.
