1. Do you want something that works and feels like GitHub? -- Forgejo and Gitea are good for this.
2. Do you want a place to host git repositories with minimal hassle? -- GitLab, CodeBerg, and others are available.
3. Do you have your own hosting infrastructure? You could use gitolite and CGit/GitWeb on that hosting platform or local hardware.
4. Do you just want to host repositories? -- Gitolite can be used to help with SSH/auth/repository creation, and CGit or GitWeb for the frontend.
5. Do you need something like GitHub Actions? -- GitLab, Forgejo, and Gitea offer CI, or use external CI infrastructure.
6. Do you need issue tracking and management? -- GitLab, Forgejo, and Gitea provide these. There are alternatives from Jira to Kanban (including Trello) to Markdown (Obsidian and others) and more.
an ssh connection and
git --bare init
Maybe the CI could be a bit better (secrets management will sting you if you don't read the docs first), but that is also pretty no-nonsense and gets the job done.
If you like no-frills and an expectation that you know what you're doing, it's pretty sweet.
Would probably scare off most collaborators though but that, IMO, is part of the appeal. If you want to contribute then it's more likely you're invested and not driving by.
Also I like that it has a concept of projects so you can group repos together (which on GH would normally require creating an organisation account). And a repo can be public but unlisted, so it's open but not drawing attention.
I hate to admit it, but GitHub has a massive community. I’ve personally seen a project leave it and then contributions dropped significantly.
It is mostly all AI agents, bots and spam anyway, not to mention most projects are now vibecoded slop on there.
You're better off going to a different forge or hosting one yourself.
Codeberg has a no LLMs policy which is very attractive for many.
> Forgejo is self-hostable free software for software development, built on top of Git. Codeberg is powered by Forgejo, which is in turn a hard-fork of Gitea. Compared to Codeberg, Forgejo is not one service, but free software to help you build your own. Everyone can install their own Forgejo instance to host their own projects. There are also public Forgejo instances as well as Codeberg you can use, but make sure you find a site that is actively maintained and updated, and that you trust the provider.
https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/what-is-codeberg/#...
> Forgejo is self-hostable free software for software development, built on top of Git. Codeberg is powered by Forgejo, which is in turn a hard-fork of Gitea. Compared to Codeberg, Forgejo is not one service, but free software to help you build your own. Everyone can install their own Forgejo instance to host their own projects. There are also public Forgejo instances as well as Codeberg you can use, but make sure you find a site that is actively maintained and updated, and that you trust the provider.
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.
The worst part about the github runner setup is that there is no built in support for using your own cache if you are using github.com and want to run your own runners. In order to use your own cache store for your runner jobs, you have to patch the runner image because the cache location is hard coded. Gitlab lets you choose your cache location as a standard feature.
The key thing that drove our decision to self host gitlab was that WE were the ones in control of when things happened. We didn't do upgrades during times where we really needed our git infra up, and we were in control of our response time to incidents. We were not at the mercy of some other company's upgrade schedule and incident resolution process.
Of course, it comes with added workload and responsibility, but as the above comment says, it was not that onerous. While we paid for Gitlab Enterprise for a long time, we eventually switched to the free tier as that company was winding down (for reasons unrelated to our choice of git hosting), and the free tier actually has pretty much everything we needed.
(Sorry for posting this twice, but we'd really love to get more user feedback)
> (we pinned to major afterwards)
I mean OK. But also, if I want a reliable service in my business, I wouldn't typically auto-upgrade docker images nightly to "*".
Happy to answer any questions.
Which is a pity - as I think most projects just need a git host + web UI + easy pull requests + a way to clone other's repos, and tangled seems to do this pretty well.
What’s the monetization plan? My biggest concern would be using this and it losing support in a few years
Give it a try at Forkmesh.com
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/#...
Just set up a CI pipeline for PHP projects with a forgejo runner last week. Tried many approaches, ended up with a simple debian VM. Runner works well with docker images inside the VM, quite a flexible setup. Found this easier and better than my last tries a few years ago with gitlab, which always felt quite bloated.
I also published a blog post today about this whole journey: https://sarah-robin.com/blog/we-just-wanted-to-deploy-a-webs...
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.
It's also free for private repos, and I have both. Codeberg doesn't like private repos, so unfortunately I cannot just move everything to Codeberg. I'll probably set up a Forgejo VPS somewhere.
Self host both of them on my internal network. Technically old version of gitea which is forgejo pre-fork
A big plus is that it also has an open-source Community Edition that you can self-host
In addition I spun up forgejo at a server at home for very critical stuff and it's awesome.
Their own site reports the 2 week uptime at 1 nine https://status.codeberg.org/status/codeberg and I suspect if you use the (really terrible) across-all-product-offerings uptime methodology that people love to post for github it would be a 0 nines overall service.
It looks like it has so many cool features -- stacked PRs, jujutsu support, CI in Nix VMs. But I've never tried it because it sounds like (at least by default) it's some sort of decentralized, peer-to-peer public thing
I worked around it to some extent by having an organisation per category, but that doesn't work at scale. For example, you can't group Text-to-Speech projects around the different libraries (coqui-ai, Qwen3, parler, etc.), or language tooling installation scripts by programming language. -- Those have a group/subgroup/repository style structure.
The other related feature is having organisation or group-level issues and corresponding tracking features.
Gitolite doesn't impose/enforce a structure on the user. GitWeb/CGit have a free-form category (e.g. "lang/python") that the project can be assigned to. That works, but I'd like it to support multiple tags/labels for that.
I think if your project is free / open source (edit: and you don’t use LLMs/AI), Codeberg is the a good starting point at least. You can move on to a self-hosted instance if you feel you’ve outgrown it, but even for larger projects I think you can get away with self-hosting just the CI runners.
And don’t forget to donate! https://donate.codeberg.org/ / https://join.codeberg.org/
What you can't do is "share projects that mostly consist of code written by 'generative AI'-tools". <https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/commit/71149c7fc95ccfeae36...>
I have not written more than maybe 10 lines of code in the last year so it seems I am prohibited from hosting on codeberg?
Or is the key word "share" and that's somehow different from "host"?
1. created by LLM agents -- any vibe-coded projects;
2. mainly written and maintained by LLMs -- this would cover the recent changes to the rsync project;
3. tied to the LLM ecosystem -- this covers pytorch, llama.cpp, cursor, SillyTavern, AI skills repositories, and a whole host of other projects.
[1]: https://codefloe.com
- 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
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)
1. People do not like email-based patch processes.
2. GitHub made everything dead simple, and free. Lots of Open Source projects have flourished because GitHub is both easy to use and makes collaboration across repository painless.
3. Very few people actually care about decentralization. As long as you have a full copy of your repo on your own machines as well as GH, it’s hard to argue you’re gaining anything with decentralization.
4. Most people also don’t want to self host a git server.
It's beyond me how people on HN can be ignorant to why GitHub gained so much market share. It's because for most dev teams, the things they add to the easily decentralized git core is *very valuable.* Arguing it's not valuable or ignoring that value doesn't help anyone.
If decentralized is really going to win, then you have to have the features and DevX to match the basics GitHub provides. Because that's what people need/want. And not just the candy-ass-not-as-good-as-the-kernel-devs devs. Lots of very talented people and very well engineered projects use GitHub because it's better for what they need. Even with all the outages, people are still there. If it was so easy to move away, people would. The fact that they aren't says something important. Please consider not ignoring it.
I self host Lore for my gamedev projects.
[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?"
[#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).
Which GitHub alternatives have anything like it?
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.
I self-host using my own read-only, FOSS, pure PHP Git repository reader for personal projects.
disclaimer: I'm one of the project leads of Gitea
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. batteries included single-file functionality (fossil binary + sqlite file and I have everything!)
2. Hosting them is super easy, I have a lighttpd server configured to do cgi-bin, and i just pop the project.fossil file onto the server and I have a project.
In the end though, I intend to use it for all of my personal projects from here out.
I have a pipe dream of turning a fossil repo into a portable distributed more-async-friendly slack clone, where the "chat", "wiki" and "forum" functionalities are all used as the back-end for a responsive UI that basically does the same thing that slack does, but lives in a single sqlite file + binary. It could run mostly offline in a kind of scuttlebutt/limited connectivity pattern (when online push/pull messages, get latest chats/files/etc, go back offline. As you go through the content, make your responses locally, then go back online, push/pull again, repeat.)
I have another pipe dream of making a RedBean APE fossil UI. I think it would be cool to have a single file universal executable that is my project repo.
There's no rebase, on principle. Branch names are permanent attributes of commits. Even abandoned branches remain visible forever. Code review is post-hoc.
People who are extremely accustomed to Git workflows may find the paradigm alienating.
With Radicle you can continue to work locally with all issues etc intact, even if your “main” host is down. You can also sync through other hosts in the network.
it gives you the obvious gitHub alternative: open-source, community-owned, privacy-respecting, non-corporate, and not built around turning your development workflow into a Microsoft-owned platform.
Would love for anyone to check it out!
^1: in my recent experience, for my particular use cases
GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49135365
Why developers are ditching GitHub for Codeberg and self-hosting alternatives
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?
Also, unified dashboards/notifications are so useful (even though Github's notification UI is a bit mediocre, imho).
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].