Atlassian Stash - new product, first experience

On may 1st 2012, Atlassian released a new product called Stash. Stash is a Git repository manager. People that know Atlassian would say "Hey, isn't it the same as FishEye?". Well no, it's not the same. FishEye is for looking at ALL of your source code, in any source repository. Stash is a repository manager for Git only. So how is it different then?

First of all, Stash is Git only. It's all about managing your Git repositories from a webapp. Organize your repositories in projects. Have your JIRA users and groups available to manage authorization for all your repositories, on both repository and project levels.

FishEye is more a repository analyzer with advanced search capabilities and history over all your source code. Stash is a management and collaboration platform for your Git repositories.

In version 1.0 Jira integration is already working. In future releases you will see commits to Git sources in the activity stream as well.

How can I use it?

Check out the documentation on how to get started. Once stash is set up, configure your local repository to use Stash as the remote repository. From that point on, all your commits go directly into Stash.

Now you can access your repositories in Stash. You can see overviews of all your commits and manage user rights on your repository, directly from Stash. I especially like the blame tab where you can see who committed the code changes.

Stash really has potential. Once it integrates with all your other Atlassian products, you'll be able to see people's commits in the activity streams, attach commits to Jira issues, view your Jira issue from Stash, etc. Version 1 is still quite basic but very useful to manage Git repositories and give others browse access to your source code.

Still, a lot of work needs to be done. There are still some things that aren't working as smooth as I'd like. For example, removing a broken project is rather difficult and setting up an external database for Stash is not that obvious yet.

But it's definitely worth having a look to see what you can do with it. Looking at Atlassian's development speed, I would expect the next version to come out within a month or two and it should provide the necessary additions to make this a great addition to Atlassian's product suite.