Today is the last day of the JH GitLab JIHULAB 101 creator camp. As my closing piece, let me share my story with JH and my experience using the JH GitLab SaaS platform.
How I Met JH
A year ago, in August 2021. Before that, this was my situation:
- Two products dominated the industry: GitHub, permanently unreachable; GitLab, prone to network dropouts.
- Domestic options: Gitee has too many restrictions, unusable once a repo gets large; Alibaba Cloud’s offering is thin on features and has now shut down in favor of CloudDev; Coding bakes Tencent Cloud into everything and I don’t want to be locked in; the rest are basically bare repos with no features.
- Self-hosting: self-hosted Gitea or GitLab always left me worrying the disk would die one day and set me back years, so I dared not make it my primary repo. Besides, GitLab really eats resources and memory — on a cloud server, an individual can’t afford it.
Then one day a news site pushed an item: GitLab had invested in a Chinese company, JH was founded in Hubei. This photo — I remember it clearly:
But the official site was just a static page with nothing functional. At first I assumed the company existed only for legal compliance, a shell for GitLab to route money through. I merely started keeping an eye on JH’s website.
August 17, 2021 — a day I was browsing aimlessly — I opened JH’s site on a whim and found it had a login page! I hurried to register somewhere, but the campaign link said the campaign had ended. What a shame. Not ready to give up, I posted on the forum instead. This very thread: https://forum.gitlab.cn/t/topic/117
Charlotte Cai replied to me, and a few days later got in touch to tell me my account was ready. That’s how the JH GitLab chapter began.
The JH GitLab Experience
After taking part in the very first “JH Hero” recruitment for testing, I wrote JH (GitLab) SaaS Platform Internal Testing Report.
Back then JH was very young, and honestly the experience was… GitLab running a copy inside China, nothing more. Pushing and pulling was faster, but using it felt no different — and because of cross-border networking issues it often failed outright.
Now, after a year of polish, it’s gained plenty that suits Chinese users better, like integrations with DingTalk, Lark, and Shimo Docs. And beyond what’s visible there’s plenty that isn’t: support for domestic environments, community knowledge Q&A, founding an open source industry alliance — a real contribution to open source in China.
The Controversies Around JH
Where there are people, there are factions. I’ve met plenty who question JH. I only hope everyone forms their own view; I won’t judge right or wrong. We’re surrounded by open source: Linux enters nearly every day and every corner of our lives, and open source moves humanity forward faster. Is standing on giants’ shoulders wrong? Must we reinvent everything from the Stone Age?