At SourceForge, we’re continually pushing the developer experience forward, trying to provide you with the tools and services that you need to develop on your projects.
Sometimes this means that we need to retire a service that has outlived its usefulness, and is no longer maintainable. Today we’re announcing the end of life of the Hosted Apps platform. Effective immediately, we’re not allowing any new creation of Hosted Apps, and we’re asking you to migrate those hosted apps into your own project web space.
Some of these apps were taken offline temporarily a few weeks ago, and two apps – WordPress and phpwebsite – remain offline.
Hosted Apps will go offline permanently on September 1, 2012. This gives you all Summer to plan and migrate your data. UPDATE: we’re pushing the date on this back. Move detail on the new timeline is on our Hosted Apps Retirement information page.
There’s a variety of reasons that this is necessary, but what they come down to is that the effort required to maintain this feature has come to outweigh the benefits. Furthermore, with a single installation of each of these apps, we weren’t able to offer you the flexibility of configuration, plugins, and themes that many projects wanted and expected.
For those of you that are using the Hosted App functionality, you can already get backups of that data for your own uses. That data is yours, not ours, and we want to be sure that you have a way to get it out.
For Classic projects, you can get a backup from: Project Admin > Features > "Backups" row > "Hosted Apps"
For new or upgraded projects, it’s in: Admin > Tools > Hosted Apps, Admin Hosted Apps > backup link.
At this time we have detailed migration documents for moving WordPress to your project web space. Docs for the next most popular apps (phpBB, MediaWiki and Trac) will follow shortly. Because these were customized versions of these applications, there’s a few tricks in migrating your data.
One major aspect of this customization was the ability to authenticate against SourceForge.net accounts, and we’ll be adding OpenID support very soon in order to replace the functionality that you’d otherwise be losing here.
Also, our new Allura platform has many core features that were provided by the Hosted Apps platform. You can migrate your project to the new platform by going to https://sourceforge.net/p/upgrade/ and pressing the “Upgrade” button.
We also have a data API which could be used to migrate your data directly to your upgraded SourceForge project. If you write such a migration script before we get around to it, please let us know.
We apologize for any inconvenience this causes you, but we’re confident that the time and resources that this frees up will allow us to move forward even more quickly on developing features to make project development even better. As always, please let us know if you have any comments or suggestions.
Please continue to check back for ongoing updates on this issue. We’ll be posting updated migration documents as soon as they are completed and tested, and we’ll continue to update you on the status of the OpenID implementation, as well as other features that will smooth the path of migration.
