I’ve recently set up my own Gitea instance and I figured I’d share a simple guide on how to do it yourself. Hopefully this will be helpful to anyone looking to get started.
If you have any feedback please feel free to comment it bellow.
I’ll be that guy: Use forgejo instead, its main contributor is a Non-Profit compared to Gitea’s For-Profit owners
As the other commenter already said it’s an abundance of caution. GItea is already moving in the direction of SaaS and an easily self-hostable solution runs counter to that plan (Gitea is already offering a managed Cloud so this is not a hypothetical). One thing that has already happened is Gitea introducing a Contributor License Agreement, effectively allowing them to change the license of the code at any time.
I think for now Forgejo is a drop-in replacement. However since they are a hard-fork, at some point in the future they will diverge enough to be mutually incompatible, so the clock is ticking on migrating.
From what I have read on the FAQ they already did a hard fork from Gitea version 1.21.11 on, which was earlier this year
https://forgejo.org/faq/#im-sold-are-migrations-from-gitea-to-forgejo-possible
There’s been a hostile takeover at Gitea and it’s now run / owned by a for-profit company. The developers forked the project under the name Forgejo and are continuing the work under a non-profit. See also: Their introduction post and a page comparing the two projects. Feel free to look up more, since I haven’t familiarized myself with the incident all that much myself. Either way though, maybe consider using Forgejo instead of Gitea.
Hostile not quite, as it was a group of core developers. But still a shitty move, especially how it was done in secrecy and disregarding other devs and the larger community.
That’s not what happened at all.
Forgejo is actually the one in the wrong. It’s an hostile fork that exist only because 3 devs were mad that they weren’t hired by the company created so that the core devs of Gitea could do it full time.
You’re just repeating their lies.
The Forgejo people never “owned” Gitea.
Could you please provide some sources for that? I’d like to know more.
First of all though, there is no such thing as a “hostile fork”. Being able to fork a project, for any reason, is the entire point of open source. And to be fair, not wanting to continue working for a for-profit company for free is a very good reason.
And yeah, when you suddenly turn a FOSS project that’s been developed with the help of a bunch of contributors, into a for-profit company, without making a big fuss about it beforehand and allow the contributors and community to weigh in, then yeah, that’s a hostile takeover of sorts, at least in my opinion. Developers gotta make money, but they could’ve done that by creating a new brand instead of taking over that of a previously completely FOSS project. Forgejo is preventing that exact thing from happening by joining Codeberg (a non-profit).
In 2022, maintainers (…) founded the company Gitea Limited with the goal of offering hosting services using (proprietary) versions of Gitea. (…). The shift away from a community ownership model received some resistance from some contributors, which led to the formation of a software fork called Forgejo. From Wikipedia.
But check that it has all the features you need because it lags behind gitea in some aspects (like ci).
It’s also ahead of gitea in some aspects: https://forgejo.org/faq/#is-there-a-roadmap-for-forgejo
Great question
I always found setting up a git server from scratch to be quite confusing and I also like the webui that gitea offers.
But recently I have also started moving some of my github projects there so having a link (with a readme and everything) that I can share with others is important.
Selfhosted Gitea is a way to get a wiki, bug tracker or whatnot - collaborate, for example, but it’s not necessary to have a Git server for your personal use.
No, but it is amazing for browsing your repos and visually seeing what you did in a past commit or a branch, while your IDE is open to your latest code. Or copying and pasting something that you need from a different repo.
For Git experts, sure they can probably do all that better inside their IDE or CLI, but for us plebs, having your own Forgejo is incredible 😍
I have mine configured to disable the wiki and issues, etc, it’s just the repo browser.
I intentionally do not host my own git repos mostly because I need them to be available when my environment is having problems.
I make use of local runners for CI/CD though which is nice but git is one of the few things I need to not have to worry about.
