News and Updates

SQLAlchemy's primary code-hosting repository is now GitHub.

The public source repository, issue tracker and wiki moves underneath a new organization which now is the home for SQLAlchemy as well as related projects Alembic, Mako Templates, dogpile.cache, and others.

The move from Bitbucket has been under consideration for well over a year, prompted by a long and slow decline in Bitbucket's quality as well as a complete lack of features and improvements to their issue tracker, ever since being acquired by Atlassian who sought to encourage users to move to Jira instead. Most critically, SQLAlchemy and related projects desperately needed the ability to apply free-form labels and classifications to issues in order to organize for common themes, as well as a capable search system and a modern, responsive web interface.

The massive technical challenge to this move was the ability to import SQLAlchemy's 4000+ issues into GitHub's issue tracker, as well as the many hundreds of issues associated with other projects. GitHub for many years lacked a usable issue import system which made the move a non-starter, but eventually a non-official issue import API was released, which after much effort was able to do just enough to make an issue import feasible, after several weeks of tweaking import scripts to format issues and their changes as well as to move thousands of web requests over a rate-limited system without being blocked.

Most recently, alternative self hosted systems like Gitea, which looks extremely promising, were considered as well, but in the end, SQLAlchemy would like to do everything it can to encourage community involvement, so it is hoped that the GitHub move will have this effect.

In addition to the move to GitHub, the SQLAlchemy organization has been set up as the owning namespace for these projects to further emphasize that SQLAlchemy is more than just "zzzeek".