There is nothing running here anymore. This domain once hosted a small, free open source forge — a place to keep your code back when keeping your code somewhere was still your own problem to solve. The service is long gone. The domain stays for historic reasons.

What it was

beijingcode.org ran a free and automatic Trac hosting system: you got a project page, a ticket tracker, a wiki, and a version control repository — Subversion, Git, or Bazaar, your choice. It was written and run by one person, Daniel Koch, on one server, and it was given away because the machine was mostly idle.

“This server is hosting projects via trac, later on additional services will be added. The hosting should not reinvent systems like launchpad, its made for smaller hobbie and home projects.”

“I used this Server quite some time for hosting my own projects, but i am only using 2% the recources and i don't might to the rest with other people.”
— the front page, verbatim, typos and all

Before GitHub was the answer

It is easy to forget how recently this was normal. If you wrote software and wanted other people to be able to find it, check it out, and file a bug, somebody had to run a server for that. SourceForge existed and was tired. Launchpad existed and was enormous. Git had only just been written and had not yet won; a project might reasonably be in Subversion, or Bazaar, or Mercurial, and a hosting service was expected to shrug and support all of them.

So people ran small forges. A Trac instance per project, an Apache vhost, a MySQL database, and a handful of shell scripts to wire up a new repository. That is exactly what this was, down to the honest admission on the front page that the automation was not finished yet: if you wanted a project hosted, you sent an email and it got added by hand.

Then a website with a cat mascot made all of that a single button, and the small forges quietly switched off, one after another, this one among them.

The machine, for the record

A period-typical stack, preserved here from the last backup of the source. The code carries a GPLv3 header and a 2005 copyright line; the newest file in the archive was written in August 2011.

Purpose: Free, automatic Trac project hosting for hobby and home projects
Version control: Subversion, Git, Bazaar — “any under Posix installable one, just ask”
Language: PHP, back when <? was a perfectly good opening tag
Templating: Smarty
Database: MySQL, via ADOdb
Anti-spam: Securimage CAPTCHA, with an audio fallback
Localisation: English, German, Chinese, French — switched by clicking a little flag
Own source: Kept in Subversion, naturally — the backup still has the .svn directories in it
Licence: GNU GPL v3
Status: Retired. No repositories, no tickets, no accounts, no data.

And now

The domain is still registered and still answers, because letting it go felt worse than keeping it. It serves this page and a couple of mailboxes. Nothing is being hosted, nothing can be signed up for, and no data from the old service survives beyond a folder of source code on a backup drive labelled, accurately, “old stuff, filter and delete”.

Consider this the plaque on the wall. It was a good little server.