To all of those proposing self-hosted GitLab: we did it for 6+ years in my company, and it's not always a smooth sailing. We had our own runners and we made it auto-upgrade across docker images daily before business start. It mostly worked really well, except those few times were a Docker upgrade had to be rolled back, or that one time the bundled pg_shared_buffers was set at 1MB by default, making schema upgrades impossible for bigger instances, or a version major would break pipeline expectations forcing to upgrade 200+ repos at a time (we pinned to major afterwards). Lately I was also receiving an almost weekly "critical patch" newsletter due to critical/high vulnerabilities, which I can only imagine are due to LLM running over the code and identifying bugs.
That said, I wish we hadn't migrated to GH, our self-hosted instance had WAY less downtime despite being perhaps a bit slower (mgmt saving money) and required a bit more toil: GH is nowhere near Enterprise-ready and it feels a downgrade across the board. GL has better access granularity, better docs, better integrations, and you can clearly see the UI received a lot of attention (although it does take 10m with a new account to pin the proper items in the maze of sub-menus that is the sidebar). You can also look at the code and help out if needed, and/or simply provide a patched version to your image via a docker mount.
If you're really looking at self-hosting GitLab for a smallish team (up to 50-100 ppl), prepare at the very least a 16GB machine (best 32GB) with 4 cores and a decent SSD, and at least a small team (1-3 people) that can maintain it properly or jump at it at any moment. For runners, a small k3s cluster is ideal to make use of all the resources you can throw at it without worrying about managing the runner state/configuration.
It's based on act[0] so it's quite like GitHub actions but not completely [1].
I found in the current version of Forgejo the most secure way to set it up was just to put the runner on a different host. There's a Docker in Docker setup [2] that was challenging to get working correctly but still didn't quite feel secure...
After setting it all up, I'm convinced GitHub actions as a concept is flawed. I wish the community would make a simpler git-defined CI/CD that didn't have the crazy surface area that actions does... Named shell scripts that can call out to other stuff in the runner Docker image and report it to the UI would be a nice start.
If you know GitHub actions then you’ll immediately understand Forgejo actions. It was designed that way intentionally. There are some differences, but at least for me not enough to warrant any pitchforks.
If you have advanced use cases you might be more frustrated, but I’m not aware of any off the top of my head. I think my biggest complaint is that they haven’t exposed action logs over the API, so I can’t build tooling around them at the CLI level, feed them to an LLM, or more quickly diagnose problems that arise without using the website.
You can use any CI/CD you want. The only reason GH is popular is that it's free for public repos.
But Forgejo does have a GH like CI/CD. If you really care about good CI/CD then you should try some of the alternatives out and decide what works best for your needs.
Self hosted GitLab has been good to me forever and has scaled and has a controllable attack surface as long as you keep on top of it
Newer app is moving to Google Cloud Secure Source Manager (because we are on Google Cloud and using backbone auth so it made more sense and less involved to manage)
I strongly disagree with the assumption that GitHub's alternative is another centralized forge. Git itself is perfectly decentralized, as was the original Linux kernel development process. How people managed to put all their eggs in one intermittently available service is beyond me. Moving the eggs into another bucket is not a solution (like Microsoft is short of servers). The SPoF is the problem. There are plumbing, porcelain and "github" layers. The "github" part has to be decentralized as well. Then, using a particular forge will be a choice of convenience, not necessity. https://replicated.live/blog/crdt
I migrated everything to codeberg several months ago (and created an annual donation schedule). I was never a big fan of github but what ultimately pushed me to ditch it was the way github was shoving copilot/chatgpt in my face without me ever asking. Codeberg has a clear stance on that and it's a stance I can totally get behind.
In addition I spun up forgejo at a server at home for very critical stuff and it's awesome.
- lightweight ( single binary written on golang )
- ci runner embedded ( podman / docker )
- pipelines are written on general programming languages - no YAML craziness - Perl/Python/Bash/Raku/Powershell/Php/Golang support
- code editor
Forgejo is splendid. Codeberg is a hosted instance; depending on what you’re developing it may or may not be a good fit for you. But the Forgejo stack itself is decently light-weight to self-host, very fast to use, and is easy to navigate.
I'm mostly using GitLab right now, both self-hosted and their hosted platform.
But am curious about Cursor Origin and certainly plan to try that out when it's available.
I personally host a forgejo instance on a private VPS ; so far almost no maintenance except protecting it from ai-crawlers[#1]. If you don't want the hassle, codeberg.org is a public instance of forgejo.
I configure my local repositories to push on both Github and my forgejo instance. I am not using the CI much for my private projects (local tests are enough in my case).
My org's GitHub Enterprise never goes down. The feature set is almost the same, though it lags a few months behind. At least you don't have to learn anything new.
My org self hosts the community version of gitlab and we are perfectly happy with it. Manage your own infrastructure, put the work into maintaining it and you'll have much fewer headaches.
You mean Gitea [0], a community-driven fork is Forgejo. There was some drama, have to admit is still don't really understand it (ask an llm I'd say). Codeberg [2] uses Forgejo and offers it as a hosted service.
no; gitea and foregjo both support actions-style CI/CD and both serve mostly GH-compatible APIs and have GH-style apps. it's not 100% compatible (forgejo is more compatible than gitea), but many of your workflows might "just work" without even renaming the .github folder.
my favourites are sourcehut (that has excellent ci, and does not try to be a github clone) and codeberg (with slightly more straightforward migration path from github)
I'd guess the technically correct answer to this question is "yes". But sourcehut has very good mailing list support, that is essentially equivalent to github pull requests.
Still, I find the wording of your question a bit prejudiced... as if I asked "does github still require pull requests via a proprietary interface instead of just sending the patches?"
I've been a Gitlab fan for a long time[0]. I typically default to GitHub for my repo slop[1], but if I'm doing something serious I put it in Gitlab. I like their CI setup better than GitHub and there's also self-host options if any of those "serious" projects ever needs that.
Also back in the day, you needed a paid account to make private repos on GitHub, but Gitlab made them free.
Anyway I haven't heard anyone complaining about Gitlab going down constantly, maybe just a function of not being the default slop-forge in the AI era, but still, they've been a long time friend to my constant hackery.
Also, Microsoft sucks.
[0]: over the years the UI has gotten a good bit more cluttered and annoying, so there's probably slicker stuff out there. But it's fine.
[1]: some of this is definitely vibe-coded LLM-vomit but I mean a more general type of slop in this case - random throwaway code, half baked ideas, etc.
Yes! And for those complaining that gitlab CE selfhosted is resource hungry: It can be tuned to only use 2 GB memory in total and run perfectly fine for a single developer or limited concurrency. Gitlab CI is awesome.
A big thing with Github its the unified functionality across most of the OSS world - that we can search across all projects, leverage pipeline actions from other projects, and easily have a single dashboard for our own contributions and interests across all projects.
I'd hate to see a move to forge balkanization lose this functionality. But this would not be heavyweight data to federate. So are there any forges with a good story for federation?
That said, I wish we hadn't migrated to GH, our self-hosted instance had WAY less downtime despite being perhaps a bit slower (mgmt saving money) and required a bit more toil: GH is nowhere near Enterprise-ready and it feels a downgrade across the board. GL has better access granularity, better docs, better integrations, and you can clearly see the UI received a lot of attention (although it does take 10m with a new account to pin the proper items in the maze of sub-menus that is the sidebar). You can also look at the code and help out if needed, and/or simply provide a patched version to your image via a docker mount.
If you're really looking at self-hosting GitLab for a smallish team (up to 50-100 ppl), prepare at the very least a 16GB machine (best 32GB) with 4 cores and a decent SSD, and at least a small team (1-3 people) that can maintain it properly or jump at it at any moment. For runners, a small k3s cluster is ideal to make use of all the resources you can throw at it without worrying about managing the runner state/configuration.
I found in the current version of Forgejo the most secure way to set it up was just to put the runner on a different host. There's a Docker in Docker setup [2] that was challenging to get working correctly but still didn't quite feel secure...
After setting it all up, I'm convinced GitHub actions as a concept is flawed. I wish the community would make a simpler git-defined CI/CD that didn't have the crazy surface area that actions does... Named shell scripts that can call out to other stuff in the runner Docker image and report it to the UI would be a nice start.
[0]: https://github.com/nektos/act
[1]: https://forgejo.org/docs/v15.0/user/actions/github-actions/#...
[2]: https://forgejo.org/docs/v15.0/admin/actions/docker-access/#...
If you have advanced use cases you might be more frustrated, but I’m not aware of any off the top of my head. I think my biggest complaint is that they haven’t exposed action logs over the API, so I can’t build tooling around them at the CLI level, feed them to an LLM, or more quickly diagnose problems that arise without using the website.
But Forgejo does have a GH like CI/CD. If you really care about good CI/CD then you should try some of the alternatives out and decide what works best for your needs.
A big plus is that it also has an open-source Community Edition that you can self-host
Newer app is moving to Google Cloud Secure Source Manager (because we are on Google Cloud and using backbone auth so it made more sense and less involved to manage)
In addition I spun up forgejo at a server at home for very critical stuff and it's awesome.
- lightweight ( single binary written on golang ) - ci runner embedded ( podman / docker ) - pipelines are written on general programming languages - no YAML craziness - Perl/Python/Bash/Raku/Powershell/Php/Golang support - code editor
I self host Lore for my gamedev projects.
https://oak.space
Would love for anyone to check it out!
[#1]: https://her.esy.fun/posts/0031-how-i-protect-my-forgejo-inst...
I configure my local repositories to push on both Github and my forgejo instance. I am not using the CI much for my private projects (local tests are enough in my case).
[0] https://about.gitea.com/
[1] https://forgejo.org/
[2] https://codeberg.org/
Then all the GitHubs and Gitlabs of this world would be limited to just providing UI and would be unable to hold our data hostage by design.
[1] https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki
[0] sr.ht
[1] codeberg.org
I'd guess the technically correct answer to this question is "yes". But sourcehut has very good mailing list support, that is essentially equivalent to github pull requests.
Still, I find the wording of your question a bit prejudiced... as if I asked "does github still require pull requests via a proprietary interface instead of just sending the patches?"
Also back in the day, you needed a paid account to make private repos on GitHub, but Gitlab made them free.
Anyway I haven't heard anyone complaining about Gitlab going down constantly, maybe just a function of not being the default slop-forge in the AI era, but still, they've been a long time friend to my constant hackery.
Also, Microsoft sucks.
[0]: over the years the UI has gotten a good bit more cluttered and annoying, so there's probably slicker stuff out there. But it's fine.
[1]: some of this is definitely vibe-coded LLM-vomit but I mean a more general type of slop in this case - random throwaway code, half baked ideas, etc.
https://about.gitea.com/
I'd hate to see a move to forge balkanization lose this functionality. But this would not be heavyweight data to federate. So are there any forges with a good story for federation?
GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49135365
Why developers are ditching GitHub for Codeberg and self-hosting alternatives
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48842611
It made sense 6 years ago as I said before [0], today it makes even more sense to self host with GitLab, Gitea or Forgejo.
...Or we can repeat the same issues again with Cursor Origin [1].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22868406
[1] https://cursor.com/origin