Online Perforce Repositories

Question

Is anyone aware of of anybody offering hosted perforce servers? It doesn't have to be free - but preferably not too expensive!

My understanding of Perforce is that it's free to use for personal projects, which mine is. Currently I have a perforce server setup on the same machine as the code is on which doesn't offer much security in case of computer failure.

If not, can anyone recommend one of the alternative solutions that is similar to Perforce? I have experience of SVN but cannot say I enjoy the experience.

Answer 1

You can use Perforce for free with up to 5 Users and if you have to you can even share one account with several users, although it's a little inconvenient to do so (and it might be a license violation).

Personally i installed Perforce server on my Internet machine which is up 24/7. I'm using a dynamic DNS service to allow others to connect to my Perforce server using a sane address like "myperforceserver.no-ip.org:1666". My upstream is 1.5 MBit/s though so that's a speed others can work with on their end but if you happen to have no more than 128 kbit/s it can be a little slow. But it really depends on the project size. Plus there are ways to make working with a slow connection to Perforce easier, like the "reconcile offline work" menu item or by using a Perforce proxy.

I concur that SVN seems like a PITA when you come from a Perforce background. As soon as you do a lot of branching and merging, Perforce is still heaven compared to any other SC system.

Answer 2

If your concern is having the server & client on the same machines, then maybe you could just use something like Dropbox or Live Mesh to back your files up continuously to the cloud?

If you do so, then my advice would be to run a regular checkpointing scheme (say every night), and store those files & an rysnc of the depot files to a Dropbox folder so they get pushed out automatically. If you're after a simple script to do the backup & checkpointing, then I've written something that should get you started. See this link

Answer 3

Wouldn't backing up the machine (online) be simpler and achieve the same result?

With the backup route:

• You get the speed & responsiveness of a local Perforce server.
• Backup protects more than just Perforce.
• There are more backup solutions so it's easier to find one that fits your needs.

Answer 4

From Perforce Licensing & Pricing the first 20 users are at $740 per user. This drops to $270/user after 10k users. And that doesn't include the other hosting costs or Perforce support.