bit.dev Functionality

Bit.dev server is a cloud service provided by Bit. Accessing bit.dev server requires registering a user account on the bit.dev server. To export and import components from a local workspace to the account, the developer must login from the local workspace.

Unlike bit-cli tool which is open-source, bit.dev server is proprietary and owned by Bit.

Bit.dev server provides these functions:

Remote scopes hosting

The primary goal of bit.dev is to be a SaaS service for hosting remote scopes.
Bit.dev manages scopes in scopes and determines the permissions users have for these scopes:

A public scope is visible to all users.
A private scope is limited to the privileged users in the organization which owns the scope.

Bit also ensures that code in private scopes is not exposed via public scopes and places the following restrictions on using components across scopes:

Components in public scopes cannot depend on private components: A public component is available for the entire Bit community. Therefore, it may not depend on components that reside in private scopes.
Components in private scopes cannot depend on components in private scopes owned by another Bit entity (user or organization). Components in private scopes may depend on public scopes, or private scopes that belong to the same owner.

In addition, for each scope Bit maintains licensing information for the components (such as MIT or GPL).

Learn more about users and scopes management.

Package Registry

All components that are exported to bit.dev are stored in the Bit package registry. The components are available as npm packages that can be installed using standard package managers (NPM or Yarn).
The bit.dev package registry is secured according to the scopes' permissions settings, so the only way to publish components to the registry is by using the bit export command.
The components in the Bit.dev registry are available with the @bit prefix. The full name of the component is in the format of npm i @bit/<owner>.<scope-name>.<component-name>.

Component Playground

The component playground is a web-based editor and rendering environment for each component hosted on Bit.dev server.
The component playground enables developing example wrappers for the component to show its various usages demonstrate its APIs.

Component CI

When a component is exported to bit.dev, the components CI (Continuous Integration) runs a container for building and testing the component. The container uses the compiler and tester defined for the component in the original project.

Each component is built in an isolated environment. The isolated environment contains the packages and dependencies defined for the component itself, without all the remaining project definitions. This isolation makes sure the component is truly stand-alone and is consumable by other projects.

The Component's CI displays the results for the component build and test run on the component page on bit.dev. When build and test tasks complete the remote container is purged.
The component is then available in the component playground.

Each container on the bit.dev CI runs:

Ubuntu jessie
headless chrome driver
latest version of Bit
node 8

Each container is limited to:

10 minutes run time
2GB RAM
0.5 CPU core

Note, for paid team plans the container specifications are higher than above

Component Explorer

component explorer

Bit.dev's component explorer allows searching across all the remote scopes that the user has access to, such as the public scopes and the user/organization's own components.
The component explorer uses metadata of the component - tags, language, framework, and size - for advanced searching capabilities.

Component Change PRs

Bit.dev provides organizations with the ability to integrate with Github for bumping versions of components in consuming projects, helping both project developers keep their repositories up-to-date, and maintainers of shared libraries track the adoption of components.
BitdevBot is a Github bot ensuring projects contain the latest versions of Bit components. The BitdevBot tracks scopes of components and a set of Github repositories. When a component maintainer exports a new version of a component, the Bot creates PRs for upgrading these updated components in all connected repositories to their latest exported version.

Github Integration

The automated dependency management gives consumers a simplified process for updating their projects. Instead of checking for updates and having to create PRs for their components which have been updated (due to updates in their child component), they get a ready-made PR with all their updates. The PRs act as push notifications when changes occur. If the repository is associated with a CI / CD process, the PR triggers a CI process, so that the consumer can know upfront if the update causes their own app to break. Library maintainers can track the adoption of new components and their updates and communicate with the project owners if they did not apply the changes in their projects.

Components PRs are available for bit.dev organization accounts only.

Integrations and notifications

Bit.dev lets you get notified and trigger additional activities when changes are made in component scopes. Bit.dev integrations are triggered when components are:

Exported to the scope (bit export <scope name>)
Imported from the scope (bit import <scope name>)
Removed from the scope (bit remove --remote <component full id>)

On each of this actions, a Slack message can be sent to a designated channel, or a Webhook can be triggered to a specific URL. Webhooks can include a token in their header.

Integrations and notifications are available for Bit.dev organization accounts only.