Get your own bazaar hosting service for free

I was looking for a free bazaar hosting service that let me use it with my private projects. Unfortunately I was not able to find anyone.

This week I came across DropBox. DropBox is a site that let you share files between computers (and between people if you wish to). The basic plan give you 2GB for free!

DropBox interface is pretty easy to use. One folder (usually named DropBox) will be used to share your files.

You put a file into the folder and it will be available into any computer you log in. have you changed the file? DropBox will update it.

Don't you want the file anymore? Delete it from your Dropbox folder and it will be delete from other computers too (as soon as you get logged into them). DropBox will keep your files synchronized. You don't have to worry about it.

So, I decided to use it as a bazaar repository. I created a folder named bzr.d under DropBox. All files I want to keep under source control are inside this folder.

Now I have my own bazaar hosting for free. And know what? You can share your bazaar repository (bzr.d in my case) with some friends and all of you will be able to develop the same project. It's a bad idea to share your repository as I've told. The reasons were pointed out by our friend Andreas (see bellow on comments). Andreas, many thanks for pointing this out.

This solution (Dropbox + bazaar) works well when there is just one developer working on it. I do it since a long time without any problem.

You can even have many repositories at the same time (since they don't occupy more than 2GB).

Do you need more space? DropBox has two paid plans (50GB and 100GB).

And you can use it as a hosting for git and mercurial too.

Edited: As you can see in comments, our friend JavaJim gave us a nice tip (Thanks JavaJim):

"If you init your bazaar repository with command bzr init-repo --no-trees my-new-dropbox-repo you can save a lot of space on dropbox. Plus, you force your friends to work on their own branches instead of editing files on dropbox directly (with no-trees bazaar hides the source files)."

I think it's worth a try.