Google Code is dead

Every now and then I stumble upon project websites hosted on Google Code. Not nearly as much as those hosted on Sourceforge, Codeplex or everybody's darling GitHub but regularly enough to know that it is a contender in the project hosting vertical.

Google announced today that it made the decision to close Google Code for good. The company released a timeline detailing various steps in the process.

Today, new project creation has been disabled on the site. This does not change a thing for existing projects which can still be updated and accessed both by project members and interested third-parties.

The next step turns the site into a read-only repository. From August 24, 2015 on all projects on Google Code become read-only.

They remain accessible on the Internet but project members cannot upload updates to the site anymore.

Finally, on January 25, 2016, Google Code is closed for good. Google announced that it will created tarballs of project sources, issues and wikis and that authorized users can download them throughout 2016. After 2016, this option goes away and all data becomes inaccessible.

The company notes that some projects hosted on Google Code will remain accessible. This includes Android and Chrome, as well as projects that Google maintains mirrors for such as Eclipse.

Google has created a migration tool to export a project to Github which Google Code project members can access on this page.

Google notes that only public issues will be exported to GitHub and that restricted view issues won't. Subversion and Mercurial repositories will be converted automatically to Git as GitHub supports only that.

The FAQ created for the exporter tool answers additional questions about the process. It is interesting to note that some projects cannot be exported to GitHub, for instance projects with 1000 or more issues and that a manual export is necessary in this case.

Standalone tools are also provided to export code to Bitbucket while SourceForge offers access to a Google Code importer on the site.

Google will auto-redirect links pointing to project websites provided that project owners set the project moved flag after moving the project to another location. Since it is likely that this won't happen for all projects, webmasters who have linked to Google Code projects before may need to update links manually as a consequence.

We have 125 references to Google Code here on Ghacks alone. While some will be auto-redirected, it still means to go through all articles referencing it to make sure there are no dead links after January 2016.

Internet users may feel the impact of this change as well as it is fairly certain that they will encounter dead links after January 2016 pointing to projects on Google Code that have not been moved or where the moved flag has not been set.