Blog Entries - XP-Dev.com

Mobius Hosting

rs — Tue, 07 May 2013 10:49:01 GMT

In the past, we have had many requests on whether we offered general hosting beyond Git, Mercurial and Subversion repositories. Other than Direct File Hosting, we did not offer anything outside of repositories.

Well, all of that changes now with a new service called Mobius Hosting which offers general web hosting (PHP, Perl, Python, RoR with MySQL), email hosting (IMAP, POP, SMTP access) and DNS hosting.

In a nutshell, Mobius Hosting is a web and email hosting service based on cPanel. However, the major difference compared to other cPanel hosting providers out there is that it includes our support, and the infrastructure has been built experience from building and scaling XP-Dev.com. So, you can expect some good amount of performance, reliability and security. Infrastructure for Mobius Hosting has been built from the ground up, and resides entirely separate from XP-Dev.com.

Another thing that has been done for Mobius Hosting is to make it cost effective. Just like XP-Dev.com, pricing plans start from just $5/month.

In a lot of ways, Mobius Hosting is a natural extension of what we offer here on XP-Dev.com. Do give a shout if you have any questions or queries, or just drop a comment below!

The service’s launch blog post can be viewed here:

https://mobiushosting.net/blog/2013/05/mobius-hosting/

Trac Improvements: Plugins Galore

rs — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 03:11:49 GMT

We’ve just spiced up our Trac offering with a few enhancements and new plugins.

Smart Commit Messages for Trac Projects

You can now use smart commit messages for Trac projects – you’ll need to enable Timing and Estimation or Agilo plugin for this to work.

Minor Enhancements

You can now enable your Trac projects to delete tickets, as opposed to just marking them as closed/resolved
There are a few new e-mail notification settings for Trac projects. You can now configure the following variables for your Trac notifications:
- smtp_always_cc
- smtp_always_bcc
- smtp_subject_prefix
- always_notify_reporter
- always_notify_owner
- always_notify_updater

New Plugins

The following Trac plugins have been added to our platform:

SSL improvements: locking down on non-SSL traffic

rs — Sat, 11 Aug 2012 02:37:58 GMT

A minor, yet significant change was pushed out yesterday: most traffic to our service should now be encrypted over SSL, especially for paid account holders.

We’ve switched all non-repository HTTP traffic over to HTTPS. Repository traffic will be switched over in the next two weeks or so. We will announce this change to all paid account holders as there are some undesired effects for doing this change to local working copies tied to non-SSL URLs.

Free account holders are at the moment stuck with non-SSL traffic for all project and repository access. This is being evaluated and almost certain to change in the coming months.

Do give a shout if you have problems accessing the service by raising a support ticket

New Release - 1st August 2012 - API

rs — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 10:16:52 GMT

We’re proud to announce a major release to our platform, with the following new features:

API

We now have a JSON and XML REST-ish API over HTTP/S. Documentation for it sits at http://xp-dev.com/docs/d/api

You should be able to perform almost all actions that’s available on our platform over the API.

The easiest way to get started is to head to your settings page, generate an API token and skim through http://xp-dev.com/docs/d/api

If there are some features that you’d like to see in our API, then please do just raise a ticket

New Documentation Site

We’ve migrated off our old documentation site http://docs.xp-dev.com to http://xp-dev.com/docs/

The new documentation site is now searchable and has a better navigation. We will be migrating content over from the old documentation site over the next few weeks.

New Permission Types

You can now apply two new permission types to your projects: Project Tracking Readers and Writes. These have the same permissions as regular Readers and Writes, but without any access to repositories.

Full documentation for permissions can be found here

Server Migration - 9th June 2012

rs — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 16:11:41 GMT

We’re doing a server migration this weekend (9th June 2012) to some bigger, faster (and meaner!) servers. These servers have much more storage and capacity, and will allow us to scale better in the future.

To be able to do this, we need to take the platform down for 4 hours starting at 9am London BST. In all our trial migration, the switch over was done in just over 2 hours. So, we’re adding another couple of hours as a contingency.

One thing to note: our IP address will change from 85.13.251.44 to 176.9.141.73. We’ve added a page on our documentation site about this:

http://docs.xp-dev.com/user-guide/ip-address-change.html

As our IP address is changing, all SSH users will need to re-verify our SSH key fingerprint (which remains the same): ca:3f:90:8c:b0:93:c0:bd:00:ad:76:37:fb:8c:65:f4

This migration does not affect dedicated instance users, only those who use our main platform.

If you have any concerns about this, please do raise a ticket.

We’ll be on Twitter posting updates as we go through the migration: https://twitter.com/#!/xpdev

New Release - 21st April 2012

rs — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 06:52:07 GMT

We have just released a new version of XP-Dev.com. The major features are:

Upgrade to Subversion 1.7

All Subversion repositories are now served with the latest version of Subversion. We have upgraded all repositories on the server-side as well.

Upgrade to Trac 0.12

Trac projects are now served using Trac 0.12.

The projects themselves are still being upgraded from version 0.11. We will update this blog post once all projects have upgraded properly. In the meantime if your Trac installation is asking you to “upgrade”, you can do this yourself via your project’s Trac tab. You need to be logged in as the project owner, and you should see an “Upgrade” button.

Edit: All Trac projects have been completely upgraded to Trac 0.12

Multiple Repositories per Project

You can now create multiple repositories for each project. When you visit your project’s Repository tab, it will display a list of repositories created for your project. You can even mix and match repository types as well.

Dedicated instance customers will be upgraded soon. The upgrade period will be coordinated with each individual customer to minimise downtime for them.

Upcoming Release - 21st April 2012

rs — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 03:34:39 GMT

We’re doing a major upgrade this weekend, on Saturday 21st April 2012. We’ll try to keep things running as much as possible, but you may find some parts of our platform intermittently going down.

We are planning to do the upgrade from 9am London BST (GMT+1) till 2pm London BST.

We will update our blog once the work is complete.

XP-Dev.com Dedicated Instances - Get Your Own XP-Dev.com

rs — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 06:05:48 GMT

We’re proud to launch a new sub-product of XP-Dev.com called Dedicated Instances

Dedicated Instances are basically your very own XP-Dev.com platform running on a virtual machine dedicated to you. There are a few things that you can do with these VMs:

Map your own domain name (for e.g. projects.mycompany.com) for the whole platform
Tighter security – you have access to logs for audit reasons, and can apply custom & complex permissioning
Run your own app, server and software (continuous integration, staging deployment, etc)
Multiple datacentre locations to improve network latencies – at the moment in Germany, East & West Coast US. Asia and Australia to follow up real soon
Platform customisation – we can customise xp-dev.com and even Trac projects to your heart’s content

Essentially, it is a managed virtual machine where we have slapped on an instance of XP-Dev.com for you, and you can use it as a general server as well. We’ll monitor it, and manage backups as well. All you have to do is well, nothing :)

Head over to the dedicated instances pricing page to explore the features in detail and signup.

If you have any questions, please do raise a support ticket or drop us an email admin@xp-dev.com

New Release - 30th October 2011

rs — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 15:46:45 GMT

We’ve just made a major update to XP-Dev.com. Listed below are some of the major changes.

A brand new UI:

The new UI is skinnable to your own taste, though we can’t released that out just yet. This should be out next.

There have been a number of changes in the workflow of the interface to make it more intuitive and clearer. If you don’t like how something has changed in the new UI, then do drop a support ticket and we’ll have a look.

HTTP/HTTPS access for Git and Mercurial

A really long wait for this one, bit its finally here! You can pull/push Git and Mercurial repositories over HTTP and HTTPS.

Additionally, Gitweb and HGWeb have been enabled as well.

General Platform Upgrades and Enhancements

The new platform has so far been our fastest to date! We’ve minimised our memory and CPU usage which has improved overall performance.

The most important change to us is that this new release allows us to do some fancy things, which will be coming up in the next few months when we begin rolling out a number of new auxiliary products for XP-Dev.com.

Upcoming Data Center Migration - 10th September 2011

rs — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 04:07:41 GMT

We will be moving our servers and equipment between datacenters on 10th September 2011. We are planning on disconnecting all our equipment at around 9am London BST. This will result in the whole of xp-dev.com being down for 10 hours while we transport and re-rack the equipment up in the new datacenter. This may change a little depending on traffic (so far, I can’t find any planned roadworks/distruptions in our journey route). We are planning on being back online at around 7pm London BST.

We will be sending out emails as well as this is quite a long downtime where you won’t be able to access your projects and repositories.

The reason we are doing this is that we are currently running out of capacity in our current datacenter and have just struck a pretty neat deal with our new datacenter providers. We need this capacity to begin rolling out some new products for xp-dev.com, which is just round the corner!

We’ll drop a note once everything is back running and we have completed our initial tests that everything is healthy.

Update: Migration completed